Dr Camille Nurka, Copyeditor | Other

Dr Camille Nurka, Copyeditor

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25.01.2022 This year's conference looks awesome!

21.01.2022 Proofreading the Sydney Jewish Museum's catalogue. The historical overview it provides of Jewry in Australia is exceptional, as is its approach to the difficult task of portraying Jewish experience of the Holocaust. It fills me with sadness and an eerie sense of foreboding that the Australian backlash against postwar European Jewish immigrants resonates so strongly in the present. I feel very honoured to be working on this project.

21.01.2022 I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that I actually do. In the simplest terms, it's preparing books, book chapters and other written materials for publication so that readers will enjoy the experience of reading the work. The reading experience is important to me because I am a reader myself. Copyediting is not just about spelling, punctuation, grammar and stylistic consistency. It is also very much about the expression of thought. I recently read a beautifully w...ritten memoir called 'Educated' by Tara Westover. In this book, she talks about the scholarly mentor who helped her learn how to write competently. As Westover writes, 'He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction.' I love this quote because it explains the dyadic relationship between idea and expression. Words are the bearers of ideas. You cannot carry an idea to a reader if your words do not flow the way they need to. Grammar is important in guiding the structure of the sentence and showing the relationships between parts of a sentence. Yet equally, as Strunk and White advise us, you may have a perfectly grammatical sentence, but the expression is so muddy and opaque, or unnecessarily unwieldy, that the meaning is confused, dampened, vague, or unsightly. I used to tell my undergrad students: 'Aim for precision!' Think about what you want to get across and use the words that best express the idea. There is no scientific program that you can follow to develop a fluid style. Even Strunk and White, the most revered analysts of good writing, admit that 'style is something of a mystery'. In attempting to convey what they mean by 'style', they describe it as the 'sound [the] words make on paper'. For me, good writing is like a wave that carries me gently on its crest. When words wash over me, and it is not laborious to glean their meaning, I am a happy reader. As a writer, you need to bring the reader with you, to take them on a journey. Your writing does not need to be floral or poetic (I consider mine to be more functional than lyrical). But it does need to carry a narrative, and if you are making an argument, it will not be persuasive or compelling unless it is clear. Strunk and White express it best: 'The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.' This is excellent advice, and it is what I seek to achieve in collaboration with my authors so that they can be satisfied that their work will be appreciated, and enjoyed, by their readers. See more

20.01.2022 PROPER NAMES AND THEIR GENERIC SHORT FORMS In contemporary editing, when proper names of bodies are abbreviated to their generic element, they are usually uncapitalised. So for example, when we refer to the University of Melbourne generically as 'the university', where the word 'university' is used alone, we generally use lower case. The same goes for other bodies with proper names, like museums, art galleries, libraries, institutes, centres, and so on. ... the University of Melbourne ... the university the Grattan Institute ... the institute the Art Gallery of New South Wales ... the gallery the Museum of Modern Art ... the museum I think there's a misperception that the shortened form should be capitalised, as this is often the case in organisations' promotional materials, but in formal writing (at least in academic book publishing), we are moving away from excessive capitalisation.

14.01.2022 Hit me with your indexes. Indexing makes me happy.

12.01.2022 Just finished polishing the final manuscript for an absorbing book about how we can conceptualise 'justice' outside of its legal sense through the Christian tradition. It's a series of conversations between philosopher Mary Zournazi and theologian Rowan Williams. It was an absolute pleasure reading their dialogues with each other and their analyses of literary works, and I learned a lot about Christian thought!