Copy editors do what?

From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You

We now know why so many writers thank their copyeditors! The glitches that she picked up were amazing – the result being that she gave us a lot of work to do!

She told us things like:  What do you mean by this? Where is the reference for that? And that? In one place you say that it is 11% in another you say that it is 11.2% - which is it, and incidentally, we don’t use the % sign, we write it out “per cent”.

By having others read chapters and provide feedback – between May and September, thirty-three people had read individual chapters – I erroneously thought that there wouldn’t be much to do at this stage. Incidentally and sadly, I received Jeff Peterson’s corrections earlier in the same week that he suddenly died – his rigorous review had similarities to those of the copyeditor. A professional is able to see errors in syntax, structural and spelling errors and help improve the flow from paragraph to paragraph. There is no ego to her (in our case, the copyeditor was female).

Kirsten Craven was connected to Florian and I by internet at the end of December. We have spent an intense three months together. We have never met in real time – she’s on the West Coast and two hours behind my time (three hours from Flo). That had the advantage that Flo and I could have something completed for her hours before she saw her children off to school.

As a lay person – not scientific – she could see all our faults.

Comparing documents – BC (before copyeditor) and PC (post-copyeditor) – the improvement is outstanding!

We are almost finished ….. Please say so! Thanks so much, Kirsten.

Florian on From Hiroshima.......

How does a Student in International Affairs end up co-authoring a book on radiation?

When I originally started my internship at PGS in January of 2011, I had no idea I would end up writing a book with the then PGS Executive Director, Dr. Dale Dewar. At the start, Dale introduced me to the mandate of PGS and tasked me with finding possible research topics that matched the organization’s objectives.

During the next couple of weeks, we discussed all kinds of topics such as women’s rights, peaceful conflict resolution as well as the issue of nuclear weapons and radiation more broadly. At this point, I did my very best to create useful annotated bibliographies that would assist Dale and other members of PGS in their research. However, I thought that the internship would end with the academic semester and focused on trying to find a job for the summer…

Then, Fukushima happened….At once my research scope was narrowed down to what Dale and I referred to as “radiation and health”. [1] It became clear very quickly that the Canadian population was concerned about Fukushima, but that access to transparent, trustworthy and easily comprehensible information was hard to come by…. Dale and I often joked about the two “experts” arguing on TV, one downplaying the risk of Fukushima, the other warning of the devastating consequences.

How was the average Canadian viewer without a scientific background supposed to know who or what to trust? After all, for every argument found on google, you can find a counter argument.

It was in this context that the idea was born to create a “booklet” over the summer that would utilize information from both the pro and anti-nuclear camps. The idea was that a reader without a scientific background could create an informed opinion on the subject matter.  That is why I, a non-scientist, seemed a good fit for this task. Someone with a lot of expertise in the subject matter risked complicating thing too much for the average reader.

Thus, I had my summer job and stayed at PGS after all. However, it soon became apparent to Dale that I was “getting carried away” with my task (in a positive sense). Towards the end of the summer, she first hinted at the possibility of this project one day becoming a book. As a result, I continued to work part time at PGS on this project while I finished my Master’s Degree at Carleton University.

Dale continued to critique my work, gave me feedback, and guided me towards areas still missing in the book. All the while, she tirelessly pursued the goal of finding a publisher. A very tedious and frustrating task indeed.

I admit, without Dale, my research never would have found its way into print. She was the one who first recognized the potential of my work. She was the one who searched tirelessly for a publisher and found one. She critiqued and guided my work and included much of her own experience and research. She was the one who gave me a chance. Thank you Dale.

-Florian Oelck  

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[1] In fact, the earliest drafts of the book had this title (I must admit the new title is much better).

From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You - on co-writing

In writing this book, I didn’t want to come across as a know-it-all because I’m not.  I consider myself an expert in rural family medicine – I’m a jack/jill of all trades and master of some. As a rural family physician which suits me well because it is merely a continuation of being raised on a farm and learning how to fix things, doing more things with less stuff and lots of fudging and improvising.

As I was growing up, I was always encouraged to “look things up” in our tiny behind-the-living room door set of shelves that was our library – it had a very fat short green dictionary that seemed to have almost every word that I looked up, a small encyclopedia set bought from Reader’s Digest on a book a month deal, and several atlases.

For some time I felt that there should be a book that linked the uses and abuses of ionizing radiation; I kept hoping that someone would write it.  It certainly sounded like a good project for Physicians for Global Survival. However, if PGS were going to write it, we needed assistance from someone who could “look things up”. Florian came to the Physicians for Global Survival’s office as part of a Master’s student community placement at a time that I needed help with some research.  He quickly produced material to satisfy the small project that I was working on and together we hatched up the idea of doing a sort of “ionizing radiation for dummies” book.

This became a scholarly thesis as he and I watched the framework evolve.  Florian did not have a scientific background; he was completing his Masters thesis in International Studies. What started as a student placement continued as the work grew. We were able to offer him a better salary than minimum wages at Canadian Tire. Flo fit into the PGS office; he drank tea, rode the bus and joined conversations. The framework of the book is entirely Flo’s with consultation. He was also the perfect skeptic – we didn’t argue but we did have lively discussions about topics or ways to present material that only served to improve the project. Flo was initially engaged as a research assistant but so much of the book was written by him that it is fully coauthored. I think that it is safe to say that he and I learned far more about this topic than we ever expected – in fact, I don’t think that we knew how much information was available about the field of ionizing radiation. We realized that we couldn’t write the “ionizing radiation for dummies” book – at least not before writing a book that explained the topic for ourselves!

What we discovered in our work was that we can not speak of the topic without defining it, its history, its science, how is it measured, what it does, how harmful is it, what can we do with it, its abuses, politics around its use and more.  We found that we were writing a history book, a social studies and political science book and a science and health care text.

Neither Flo nor I could have done this without the other.