But the long form’s relevance to Canadian society is precisely because of the length and depth of information that it attempts to gather. Now, let me back up for more context:

In 2006, I was in the middle of my Bachelor’s degree and looking for a summer job. I managed to get one working at a call centre that StatsCan was renting temporarily near Bay and Dundas in downtown Toronto. Census Help Line Operators were taught about the history of the Census, learned the answers to the FAQs that would be posed by incoming callers, and trained on how to assist callers with completing their forms over the phone.

I learned several things while working as an agent at the call centre:

1. Call centre work stressed me out.
2. The general populace had a remarkable lack of knowledge about what the Census was for, and how it affected their lives in the long-term.
3. This lack of knowledge was often, but not always, accompanied by suspicion about the government’s “meddling” in regular affairs.
   • To which I say: huh? Um, don’t you buy products that have been brought into the country under the auspices of Canada’s import/export laws? Don’t you take advantage of subsidized health care? Don’t you receive your mail from Canada Post?
4. Like some grim parody of the stages  of reacting to someone’s death, people’s reactions to the length of form 2B (the long form of the Census, easily topping a few dozen pages) ranged from fear, to confusion, to anger, to acceptance.

Lesson 1 led to me eventually quitting that job and finding another part-time gig for the rest of the summer.  Lessons 2 through 4 fed rather nicely into lesson 1 – imagine picking up the phone constantly, with no control over the flow of incoming calls, not knowing knowing the mood of the caller on the other end. Would they be neutral, curious, accommodating, upset?

Reading out the 2B form to people who requested assistance over the phone was a lesson in patience and required mastery in both proper diction and the technique of discreet water-bottle-sipping. That form was loooong. It asked some garden-variety questions regarding age, sex, name, marital status, and so forth, but to that, it added questions about:

• work history, commutes and incomes
• ethnic and cultural background
• the health of Census respondents, including information about chronic conditions
• languages spoken within the home
• the size, market value, and bedroom distribution of the home

Helping citizens answer these questions ranged from pleasantly easy to tooth-pullingly difficult. But one thing I did notice was the gratitude in people’s voices when I took the time to explain questions, repeat them, and rephrase them into simpler English.

And it is precisely because of this gratitude that I think the long-form Census should continue. Making the long form voluntary only eliminates those respondents who would be scared to answer these questions without assistance. Let’s face it: it’s a document containing over 50 questions, many of which contain subtle variations that may be difficult to detect. Making the long form voluntary means that those who would be put off by such a document – those with poor literacy skills, those who do not use English as their first language, those who know little about the support systems the government has in place, and many more – are less likely to fill it out.

There’s a simple term for this sort of phenomenon: sample bias. More specifically, it’s sample bias arising from self-selection into a group – the group in this case being those who, in the 2011 Census, would fill in their long forms voluntarily. Sample bias is an introductory concept in sociology and statistics courses, and I learned about it myself in my introductory philosophy course in logic and practical reasoning, way back in my first year of undergrad.

Which leads me to wonder: what sort of trick does Harper think he’s pulling? This is stuff that thousands of young, enterprising minds are being taught to prevent and avoid every day! Can he seriously think that abolishing the long form so suddenly would go by unnoticed?

This blog has been rather short on political commentary, and it probably will be in the future as well. But here is one thing I’m not shy about saying: Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s social policies have bordered on the exclusionary for far too long. This is an issue I’m familiar with, in a level that few academics and pundits have been. I’ve been on the ground floor. I helped hundreds of Canadian citizens themselves answer these questions on a daily basis, and heard how they reacted when I explained to them, in simple language, how the Census affected urban planning and education. Many of them want to help make these changes a realty. No one, not even the Prime Minister, should deny them that chance.

So I watched it a second time yesterday evening, mainly to provide fodder for here.

My overall esteem for the film has not changed upon watching it again; it’s charming and filled with actors gamely servicing the needs of an original plot. The scenes between Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman are clever, and the budding romance between Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhall has believable chemistry. However, I find that the scenes involving the author, played by Emma Thompson, mostly fall flat. What really irks me is that the movie seems to have no conception of how writers write, or of how manuscripts are actually made and processed.

The end of the movie states that the weird events depicted within took place over a period of four weeks. The movie (and the author’s narration) takes place over this period, from beginning to end. Prior to this, the author narrating Harold’s life, and thus narrating the book, experienced writer’s block for ten years – despite this, her previous books were critically acclaimed. When her draft of Harold’s life and death is complete, the literature professor who reads the manuscript pronounces it a masterpiece, precisely because of the emotional impact that Harold’s death provides.

Unfortunately, I find several things wrong with this scenario.

First, I find it hard to believe that anyone, even a highly-accomplished author, could crank out a literary masterpiece in a single month. The operating word is masterpiece; can any professional author instantly write one after having not written a single publishable thing for a decade?

Second, I find it hard to believe the book could be publishable without heavy substantive editing. I like to think that this is the true purpose of Queen Latifah’s character in the movie – that she nudges the book along towards birth by providing editorial feedback – but her part is so perfunctory that she contributes little to the plot. Literary masterpiece or no, you need to get an editor to look at that text before it’s ready for the press, and there was no discussion of the quality of the work beyond “Oh My God, It’s Art!”

Third, the writing in question is atrocious. It’s self-conscious and uses a twee, grating gimmick (Oh look! Harold’s watch is sentient and has feelings!) to introduce us to our hero. More importantly, it commits the cardinal sin of telling, not showing: Harold did this and Harold thought that. Most of all, Harold is aware of the author’s narration and rebelling against it, but although his self-awareness is actually incorporated into the story, it’s never explained within the context of the story that the author herself is writing. Let’s take one of the scenes where Harold Crick hears the author’s voice, is exasperated, and cries out in public:

Harold Crick: SHUT UP!
Kay Eiffel: [voice only] Cursing the heavens in futility.
Harold Crick: [extremely annoyed] No I’m not! I cursing you, you stupid voice so SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE!

Harold is cursing to the sky because he doesn’t know how to make The Voice stop. His action, although desperate, makes sense within the context of what the audience sees and hears onscreen. However, what has Kay written in her own book that motivates her written interpretation of Harold to scream? Why does Book Harold curse the heavens? Except for a general feeling of malaise and loneliness, Book Harold’s scream is not explained within the context of the novel. What is he feeling futile in comparison to, when the author is unaware that Real Harold can hear The Voice? If I were reading this book, I would feel that the author tried to indicate her main character’s sense of desperation using the laziest method possible.

Finally, I have a hard time believing that Emma Thompson’s character, in and of herself, could write anything considered a masterpiece. She’s a bundle of nerves and sunken-in eye sockets. I think this is what stuck in my craw the most upon both viewings. Kay Eiffel is a big huge bag of artistic stereotypes. Compulsive smoker? Check. Dismissive of others who don’t understand her particular artistic process? Check. Tortured? Check and check.

I know a lot of writers. I have the privilege of meeting many of them on a monthly basis as part of working with the WCDR. And none of them, none, are as self-absorbed or willfully hermetic as Kay Eiffel is. When I go to the WCDR’s breakfast  meetings, I meet people who smile, are interested in each other, and are generous with their time and attention. I meet people who laugh and make jokes. I meet people who are willing to discuss their latest writing projects in detail, and support others who are doing the same. In short, I see a kindness and generosity of heart that I have been hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

To believe that a writer has to be tortured or cynical or somehow larger-than-life to write successfully submits to Byronic myth-making of the worst order. We can leave that posturing to angsty high school students, right? Presumably, the screenplay itself was written by someone who understands both “the writer’s life” in general, and how to write something that will sell. Moody artists may look sexy, but they’re generally not fun to work with, and people that aren’t fun to work with don’t get very far. So why should a movie about writing perpetuate this?

Hell, if we wanted to really oversimplify things, we could even say that it’s a left-brain/right-brain divide.

Thus, I was intrigued when I received an email from the EAC about the Apple Expo being held today at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I’ve been a pretty unwavering Windows user throughout my life, but I’ve been considering switching over to Apple when I upgrade my laptop (which will probably happen next year). What could going to the Expo – for free, even, since I got a coupon code through the EAC – teach me about migrating my documents from one system to another?

Little to nothing, it turns out.

While I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Expo room was not packed to the brim with slavering, white-earbud-sporting Mac cultists, that was the only thing that really struck me as positive about the event. The room was small and the exhibitors showing their wares just seemed like the same manufacturers you could see in an electronics shop (although the products being shown were fairly high-end, in some cases).  However, none of the free seminars offered at the seminar explicitly discussed the process of migrating from a PC to a Mac from a beginner’s perspective.

Sure, there were seminars on cloud computing, and iPads, and how to make proper backups, and how to do the latest tricks on Creative Suite 5, and all of that jazz. And yes, there was a seminar on “integrating” Windows with Apple computers, but nothing that addressed the bare-bones idea of “Oh, you wanna switch to a Mac? Here are some things you need to know.”

Considering that this is one of Apple’s key strategies for gaining market share (viz: the “I’m-a-Mac-I’m-a-PC” campaign), this oversight has left me flummoxed. If you’re going to be running a show about Apple products, who is going to attend? People who are curious about Apple products, obviously. And which people are likely to be the most curious about Apple products? People who don’t have any, and want to start learning about them! I know Apple can be considered a very insider-friendly company,  but can’t we leave that for the Steve Job love-fest that happens every year when he releases the next iWhatsit?

Perhaps my expectations were far too high for an event that I was able to attend for free. But honestly, I went there expecting to learn more about why I should consider switching to a Mac, and what to keep in mind while doing so. All I got out of it was a free ballpoint pen. Wouldn’t it be normal to feel disappointed?

Even so, I still had lots of ideas for content swirling around in my head.  To get the ball rolling again, I’ll start talking about something small: ligatures in typography.

In typography, ligatures are when two letters written in sequence fuse together to appear as one character. Typically, the use of ligatures in English is restricted to letters following a lower-case “F” and even then, they don’t occur in many common typefaces. However, I do have some examples to show you, using that ever-trusty typeface Caslon:

In the image above, the “F” and “L” merge together in fly, and we see an interesting example of a double ligature in waffle. Perhaps the most unusual example I’ve provided is the third word. What is Umuofia?

Umuofia is a word that was the bane of my first year in University. As part of my introductory course in International Development Studies (one of the fields I eventually chose to major in) at Trent University, my class had to read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe – Umuofia was the village that the story took place in.

And why was that word the bane of my studies? Because of that goddamned ligature – how on Earth was that last set of characters supposed to be pronounced? Feee-ah? Feee-yah? Fyah? I was convinced that the ligature was not simply a convenient way of typesetting the letters “F” and “I”, but that it was a special diacritical mark affecting the entire pronunciation of the name – was the second “U” silent? Where did the emphasis fall? It drove me to distraction.

So, ligatures. As I found out in my book production course at Ryerson, they are not in fact some fancy literary device – at most, they are a fancy aesthetic device, and that makes all the difference.

Last evening after the seminar involved a meet-and-greet with hundreds of people; there was free wine and lots of yummy Quebec cheese – oh, how I love chevre cheese with some cranberries! – and even a taste-testing table of Montreal bagels. Afterwards, I went for dinner with three other editors to Le Pelerin Magellan and ate veal curry on a gorgeous backyard patio.

We talked about our careers, and what led each of us into editing. It was simultaneously comforting, humbling, and awe-inspiring. We all want to do the same thing, but the other editors had so much more life experience (international travel! working with microcredit banks! buying a house and watching the property value go up like a rocket!) that I felt like I hadn’t really accomplished anything with  my life.

Today I attended seminars on networking and on explaining grammar, and attended a one-on-one session with a mentor to discuss any question of my choice. I chose to talk about editing rates, and while I still need to figure out a solid rate card, the person I spoke to confirmed that the rates I had chosen for myself were reasonable for my level of experience.  All in all, it was very encouraging.

Then I attended the AGM, and afterwards had dinner with my EAC-appointed member from the Toronto Branch. We’ve figured out how to correspond over the remainder of our appointed mentorship term. I’m going to start doing the Proofreading section of the EAC’s Meeting Professional Editorial Standards series, and he’ll critique my answers to the proofreading exercises. Then I’ll compare his answers to the answer key provided in the handouts I have. Cross-reading the two will be an interesting, and hopefully fruitful, experience.

How appropriate, then, that the seminar I took today was all about explaining editing to professional editors – it helped me clarify some approaches to text that I was already using instinctively, but hadn’t been able to put into words.

Other EAC members will know exactly what I’m talking about: Eight-Step Editing.

Eight-Step Editing doesn’t teach you about grammar. It doesn’t teach you about punctuation. It doesn’t even teach you about spelling. Instead, it teaches you about how to look at a piece of writing, and how to make it clearer by applying a number of steps in sequence, thus streamlining the editing process while keeping the author’s voice in mind. Each step, applied in sequence, progressively shifts the balance of the writing voice away from the author to the editor; the goal is to minimize this shift during each step.

In short, the eight steps are:

1. Shorten sentences:  break longer, run-on sentences into shorter, more compact sentences. Each sentence should contain one individual idea.
2. Remove useless words: get rid of verbal filler – text that doesn’t further the point of the writing. The reason to do this is because if you write too many useless words like I am writing about at this point in time, your sentences will sound unnecessary and redundant, and your audience will get bored as they will lose interest in what you are taking so much time to talk about.
3. Use positives instead of negatives: you should never not try for clarity, because not doing so will not make your writing easy for your audience to read.
4. Avoid unnecessary complexity: reduce words with lots of prefixes and suffixes down to their root words, and recast the sentence accordingly. Antidisestablishmentarianism, anyone? Alternately, recast sentences containing three or more long, obscuring words in a row. Because it is your job to eschew superfluous obfuscation.
5. Reduce the use of linking verbs: especially variations on “to be.”
6. Reduce the use of the passive voice: it is used by too many authors to inflate their word counts.
7. Start with strength: place your most important or attention-grabbing piece of information first in writing. I can only wonder in the irony of having this step placed seventh in the list.
8. Structure your paragraphs: make each paragraph start with a strong topic sentence, and give each shift or alteration in the topic at hand its own paragraph. Ideally, each individual topic sentence, read in sequence, should tell the reader all they need to know.

What’s really interesting is that I was doing a lot of the higher-level (parts 4-7) in my own editing ps.projects. Sometimes the big, important steps, like making new sentences out of longer ones, is so obvious you forget to think about it.

Did I mention that I had my purse, a laptop bag, and a third piece of luggage to juggle around across two cities? And that I (foolishly) decided to bring along my black trench coat? Or that it was very hot and humid in Montreal? And that to get to the lobby of the hostel, I had to climb a flight of narrow stairs? And, finally, did I mention that I have to PAY to use the lockers at this hostel? The one I went to last year in New York allowed travelers to secure the lockers using their own combination locks, so I thought it would be the case here (and so I bought a new lock when I couldn’t find the old one I’d been using since grade seven), but evidently not.

Fun!

But I have persevered. Now, I am on top of a bunk bed in the basement of a hostel, with a belly full of very cheap and satisfying pub grub courtesy of Le Saint-Sulpice. Dinner involved meeting up with other editors from across the country (hailing from places as diverse as Halifax  and Athabasca) and chatting, learning about their careers, and putting names to faces – and in some cases, faces to names. As the evening wore on, the weather cooled down and breezed up, and I managed to find my way back to the hostel from the restaurant all by myself, just trusting to my memory from the way there. As I walked up Rue St-Denis, enjoying the sounds of people chatting and realizing that I actually knew where I was going, I felt more independent than I had in a long, long time.

Booked a spot at the conference? Check.

Found accommodations at a hostel? Check.

Booked my VIA rail ticket? Check.

Made sure to request the time off from work well in advance of the dates involved? Check and check!

There are still a lot of other, smaller things that need to be done, like printing off new business cards and getting my confidence levels up before I go (not to mention finishing working on websites for two clients of mine), but I really do feel in control of this thing. Now I’m just waiting to find out of the EAC will issue an official package to attendants before it starts. Lord knows I’ve been looking forward to going since Christmas. Let’s just hope that I don’t incur any catastrophic, trip-cancelling injuries in the interim.

assure (verb)
1. To inform positively, as to remove doubt: assured us that the train would be on time.
2. To cause to feel sure: assured her of his devotion.
3. To give confidence to; reassure.
4. To make certain; ensure: “Nothing in history assures the success of our civilization” (Herbert J. Muller).
5. To make safe or secure.
6. Chiefly British To insure, as against loss.

ensure (verb)
To make sure or certain; insure: Our precautions ensured our safety. See Usage Note for assure (above).

insure (verb)
1.
a. To provide or arrange insurance for: a company that insures homeowners and businesses.
b. To acquire or have insurance for: insured herself against losses; insured his car for theft.
2. To make sure, certain, or secure. See Usage Note for assure (above).

v.intr.
To buy or sell insurance.

On the surface, all three of these words have a similar concept at heart: that of safety, reinforcement, and protection. And why not? All three words are derived from the Latin word “securus,” meaning “safe” or “secure.” Furthermore, American Heritage 4 says that “assure” can be used interchangeably with the other two words, and even that “insure” can  be used interchangeably with “ensure.”

So what are the differences? They’re mainly ones of nuance. To me, the word “assure” evokes the idea of psychological security, as outlined in the first three definitions of “assure” that were listed above:

• You can rest assured that Mighty Mouse will come to save the day
• Laurie assured me that she had everything under control

As a side note, I find it interesting that the definition above states that “assure” and “reassure” mean the same thing, because then it seems that my dictionary is inconsistent. American Heritage 4 has this to say about “reassure”:

re·as·sure (verb)
tr.v. re·as·sured, re·as·sur·ing, re·as·sures
1. To restore confidence to.
2. To assure again.
3. To reinsure.

If we take these definitions at face value, “assure” means “to reassure,” which means “to assure again” – which means that “to assure” means “to assure again.” Maybe I’m reading everything wrong, but isn’t this rather tautological? Shouldn’t dictionaries try to guard against such things?

No matter – onwards we go!

If “assure” implies psychological security, then “insure” implies financial or economic security. Buying life insurance or home insurance means putting an economic safeguard in place if your house burns down, or if you die: your family gets some sort of financial compensation for bad things happening.

Finally, if “assure” relates to psychological security, and “insure” relates to financial security, what does “ensure” relate to? I feel pretty comfortable saying that “ensure” relates to most other tangible and intangible forms of security:

• Please ensure that your seat belt is buckled during take-off and landing
• Loretta, by agreeing to be my child’s babysitter, you ensure that my child will be safe while I’m at work
• We must ensure that the important company report is delivered to Mr. Calhoun by Tuesday

So, there we have it. There are other websites you can visit to get a better handle on this particular issue; I highly recommend Grammar Girl if you’re looking for an explanation that is more compact.

Other than that, I found out about two nice EAC initiatives today: the Conference Buddy system and the mentoring program.

The mentoring program is exactly how it sounds: people with experience partner up with new editors and provide guidance on how to become a better editor. The pilot project has now finished, and now the program has been opened so that Toronto branch members can act as mentors or mentees. I’m still working on my application, but you get three guesses as to what I’m applying to be.

The mentor program is something that I’ve been expecting to become public for the last little while. However, I only found out today about the EAC’s “Conference Buddy” program. If you join, you’re matched up with a group of other “buddy” editors and are encouraged to chat and get to know each other before heading to Montreal. Then, at the conference, these people become your anchor group that you’re encouraged to keep in touch with during seminars, lunches, and other social events. Since this is my first conference, it seems like a wonderful way to meet new people and  break the ice. I’m really looking forward to it.