Friday, July 08, 2011
News: Toward a New Phase • SWET Newsletter Editorial Team
From the Trenches
Even without a natural disaster of epic proportions, 2011 seemed slated to be a turning-point year for SWET. With our 30th anniversary behind us, generation change rapidly taking place within our membership, and the rise of new technologies, values, and tastes, it seems time for something fresh. The SWET Newsletter in its present form is ready to be superseded.
The current editorial team that has supported the newsletter in its present guise will carry on in this format for two more issues, No. 129 and No. 130, taking us to the beginning of 2012. We look forward to input and contributions to fill our pages for these issues so that we can go out with our sails filled right up to our self-proposed finish line. Please help make the next two issues rich and full through our “mutual exchange of professional wisdom.”
So there is plenty of time to think: What will come next? Who will be its architects and coordinators? What are the potentials and possibilities? We hope that all those who value the society and sharing of wordsmiths will think about how to answer such questions and contribute to implementation of the answers arrived at. Those of us who now work on the Newsletter hope there will be plenty of ideas, discussion, and mulling of options.
There is much to be learned from other organizations. Even though a cross-professional society like SWET seems to be one of a kind in the world, models of similar feather may be found in the Editors’ Association of Canada (another organization with a 30-year history), the American Copy Editors Society, the Editorial Freelancers Association in the United States, the Society of Editors (New South Wales, Australia), the Society for Editors and Proofreaders in the United Kingdom, the American Translators Association, and so on, all of which are a few mouse clicks away even for the most remotely located professional.
So, don’t sit back and wait to see what someone else will do! Remember, SWET is you!
SWET Newsletter Committee
newsletter [at] swet.jp