A fortunate life
I have been fortunate enough to love my work all my life. Every job taught me something new. When I look back, many of the companies I worked for have since changed tremendously, and many of the programs I learned have become obsolete – but their influence remains. I am constantly drawing on my past experience to solve new problems.
Below you will see that I have experience in bookkeeping, bookselling, desktop publishing, computer programming, librarianship, training, audio taping and transcription, videography and website editing and maintenance, to produce annual reports, audit reports, databases, LaTeX documents, operating manuals, policies and procedures, PowerPoint presentations, and theses and dissertations, as well as Excel dashboards, Power Query and Power Pivot – in the fields of agriculture, education, engineering, entrepreneurship, interior decorating – and let’s not forget fiction.
What do I know?
I have a BA degree in English and a higher diploma in librarianship, and I have been editing since 1994. I am accredited as an English text editor by the Professional Editors’ Guild.
Librarianship
From 1976 to 1981, I worked for the Natal Provincial Library and Museum Services. We took an exchange of books in a book van (like a bus without windows) to about 250 small municipal and school libraries on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal from our base in Pinetown. I was away from home for a week in every month, staying in out-of-the-way hotels between Durban and Port Edward, and inland to Oribi Gorge and Harding.
Bookselling
For the next two years, I worked for Logan’s Bookshop in Durban, selling books to the three major public libraries in the province, and managing a general book- and stationery shop.
Architecture and Bookkeeping
In 1983, I set up an architectural library for Franklin, Garland, Gibson & Partners, also in Durban, using a Scandinavian cataloguing and classification scheme specific to the building industry. I then combined maintenance of the library with bookkeeping, under the supervision of the firm’s accountant.
Desktop publishing
In 1987, I moved to Pretoria to work for the S. A. National Council for the Blind (SANCB) as librarian of the Blindiana Library, a reference library about blindness – for the families, friends and colleagues of blind and partially sighted people.
In 1988, I took on the tasks of Publications Officer and was made Head of Information Services. I acted as editorial assistant to the blind Executive Director of the SANCB and produced a bimonthly black-and-white journal called Imfama, three biennial reports and six books in English and Afrikaans. I wrote several of the Imfama articles myself, and bought myself a camera so I could take better photos than the dreadful ones people sent me to illustrate Imfama articles.
I had always thought I was useless on computers, but perforce became computer literate in DOS 3.1, Lotus 123 and WordPerfect. I especially appreciated Ventura Desktop Publishing, which prepared me for MSWord styles.
Computer programming
A kind person donated a computer program to the Blindiana Library, leaving it open-ended for me to customise, so I learned Dbase3+ and Clipper and developed a comprehensive library management program.
I am proud of that achievement and it has stood me in good stead, enabling me to understand the logic of computer codes and macros. I even started teaching myself Visual Basic for Dummies – not very successfully, so I enrolled for the Excel Campus VBA PRO course in 2021. I downloaded all the Excel Campus videos so I can go back to them whenever I find the time because it would be so silly to lose my “programming” skills.
What do I do?
Editing
In 1994, I found my forté in editing. I moved to Johannesburg and turned to freelancing, where I used my knowledge of DTP to formulate templates for a variety of documents in a variety of fields.
Engineering
MBB Consulting Engineers gave me agricultural and civil engineering reports, specifications and tenders to edit.
Rural Integrated Engineering gave me a Current Practices Report to the Water Research Commission to edit and typeset. It was grandly called Participatory Development of Training Material
for Agricultural Water Use in Homestead Farming Systems for Improved
Livelihoods – and I compiled parts of two of the eight chapters.
Agriculture
I edited and typeset working papers, research reports, journal articles, information booklets and a newsletter for the International Water Management Institute, South Africa. They flew me out to their head office in Sri Lanka to see if it would be worth getting their publications printed in South Africa – but Sri Lanka is cheaper.
A Challenge Programme funding proposal I edited for the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) was the only one out of about 16 that was accepted. FARA therefore asked me to edit their web page and flew me out – twice – to Accra and once to Nairobi to edit their conference proceedings while the conferences were in progress.
I edited and formatted reports, working papers, conference proceedings, newsletters, brochures and annual reports for the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network.
Education
I edited reports for the S. A. Institute for Learning Disabilities on the progress of the children in their programme. I typed lessons for the South African curriculum of the Grade 1 class in an Accelerated Christian Education school for Mrs V N Lines. I have always been interested in how adults learn and even participated in a church literacy and numeracy course. Since then, I have edited several theses by primary and tertiary educators
Non-fiction
I have edited a book about how to set up a small business, and a book about interior decorating. There was an autobiography about the violent life of a missionary before he became a missionary, and a book asking Who Am I in God’s eyes.
Fiction
I edited a fantasy novel for young adults, and the author of a children’s book I edited received a prize for the best self-published book in its category.
Databases
I learned MS Access and PowerPoint to help Orbicom (a subsidiary of MultiChoice) with PR and set up MS Access databases to catalogue their photographs and clients, and produce various reports.
Operating manuals
In 1998, I edited technical operating manuals for tank turrets at Lyttelton Engineering Works, a division of Denel.
Contracts and proposals
I edited and typeset generic documents, contracts and proposals to clients for Fedics (Pty) Ltd.
Policies and procedures
I researched, designed, developed, wrote, edited and updated a Financial Policies and Procedures Manual and a Finance Training Manual for the Fidelity Services Group so they could comply with ISO 9001 requirements.
It required logical thinking and reasoning skills to assimilate and structure information into creative, stimulating, user-friendly formats that were appropriate for the audience and intention of the documents. I learned at first hand how difficult it is to get people to write policies and procedures, even if they are about work they do every day. When I grew tired of waiting for the managers to write their contributions, I wrote what I thought they wanted to say and gave it to them to use as a starting point.
The freedom I was given to teach myself whatever I needed for formatting the manual enabled me to add Microsoft Office programs and new technology to my desktop publishing skills.
The Fidelity group was using a miscellany of manual forms for SAP so I re-did them all in Excel to brand them as coming from the same company.
My proficiency in MS-Word enabled me to use many shortcuts to improve the work. For example, to make the manuals user-friendly, I hyperlinked all the related parts together, to facilitate step-by-step processes and so fields could be automatically populated in related forms.
Since I find forms easier to understand if they are filled in than if they are blank, I amused myself by illustrating the manual with forms completed, checked and signed by imaginary officers in an imaginary company.
Annual Reports
It was in preparing the Fidelity group’s annual reports for publication that I learned about the complexities of financial statements. These days, MS-Word table templates are so handy for quickly formatting the tables
Theses and dissertations
I edited and typeset Master’s and PhD theses and dissertations for students who attended workshops run by Dr Erik Hofstee’s company, Exactica. I set up its office systems in Excel and MSAccess, and populated the php website. I wrote the Word Tips on the website and, concerned about business continuity, wrote an instruction manual for administering them all.
I used MSWord to format Dr Hofstee’s book Constructing a Good Dissertation for publication, and my librarianship background helped me compile the instructions and examples for the Harvard, APA, MLA and CMS referencing styles at the back of the book and on the website. More recently, the same librarianship skills helped me check references in the Vancouver and IEEE referencing styles.
My work for Exactica inspired me to obtain accreditation as an editor of English from the South African Translators’ Institute (SATI) in 2006 – the pass mark is 80%! I allowed that accreditation to lapse because I am now accredited as an English text editor by the Professional Editors’ Guild (PEG) and a member of their executive committee.
Website editing and maintenance
Populating the php website for Exactica prepared me for learning CSS and HTML in order to set up my own WordPress website.
Audit reports
For 11 years, I edited audit reports for Gauteng Audit Services (GAS), currently internal auditors for the Gauteng Provincial Treasury. I created and maintained Excel workbooks for the clients to report their progress in implementing the auditors’ recommendations.
PowerPoint
Many of the GAS reports were accompanied by PowerPoint presentations. It was fun to make them more effective by applying transitions and animations.
Plain Language
I persuaded GAS to send me on a plain language course with Writers Write. What a pleasure to be told that we are now legally required to use a short word instead of a long one.
Excel dashboards, Power Query and Power Pivot
Auditors generally have difficulty getting their clients to implement their suggestions in order to correct their audit findings. Even if the clients “agree” to action plans, they seldom change their ways. I was therefore asked to set up Excel spreadsheets to monitor GAS clients’ progress in implementing their action plans, and I liaised with the clients’ risk managers to update the worksheets monthly. The results were included in monthly reports to their clients (Gauteng Provincial Government departments) and quarterly reports to audit committees: I helped compile and format them.
The volume of work required learning from myonlinetraininghub how to speed up the reporting with Excel dashboards, Power Query and Power Pivot.
Audio taping and transcription
I taped conferences and transcribed the records for L & B Recordings. This gave me the impetus to learn how to control an analog sound desk for our church worship team (I started learning how to use digital controls but my trainer moved on to more lucractive fields). From audio, the next step was video.
Videography
When my husband bought himself a video camera, I went with him to an excellent video club, which opened up new vistas of fascinating knowledge. I am mostly an observer who takes minutes but I have made some videos of my own.
Training and training manuals
Along the way, I found out that I loved passing on the knowledge I had acquired. I have helped various people with MSWord, Excel and Visio (flowcharts), and streamlined their Microsoft systems and office procedures. I did layout and some editing for training manuals Gray Training. Later, I wrote MS-Word and Excel training courses for GAS so I could train PAs to format and auditors to write better audit reports.
LaTeX
I have now edited a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation in LaTeX. It was a novel experience. LaTeX claims that it does all the formatting for its users but, as far as I can see, they have to do more formatting than users of MS-Word! A course with the University of Bombay taught me how to format in LaTeX.
My clients and I collaborated with Overleaf, which allowed me to leave comments and to track my changes.
What next?
Because I have such a wide spread of skills and experience, I could help almost any office to operate more efficiently. I could go to an office, work with the manager to see how things are currently done and how they could be improved – or do it by Zoom. I could design faster and more efficient ways of doing things and then, if the manager approves, train the staff to implement the new methods. This would probably take one month per business unit. If necessary, I could then write a manual for the new policies and procedures, which would make the office ISO-compliant. This would require interpersonal skills and the ability to network effectively with co-workers to anticipate user needs and to design the most appropriate material.
But I would like editing to remain my “next”. Both Lyttelton Engineering Works and GAS gave me security clearance to view secret documents. In fact, they investigated my integrity – the same integrity that enables me to enjoy a job that requires a lot of conscientious nitpicking (otherwise referred to as “a search for excellence” – or OCD!). An editor’s job is not finished until every “i” has been dotted and every “t” crossed.
Teamwork
For me, the best part of editing is working as a team with the author to produce effective, polished documents. The author remains the owner of the document so the editor must keep a delicate balance of constructive criticism, humility and professional confidence.
PEG provides a different kind of teamwork through its chat group, where editors support one another. I want to be involved in those kinds of teamwork for the rest of my life.
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