Friday, 4 November 2005: 19.20-20.40
METM 05, Barcelona, Spain

Keynote speech

The sense of editors’ associations: a case report on SENSE, an editors’ group in the Netherlands

Joy Burrough-Boenisch, PhD, founding member of the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors in the Netherlands (SENSE), is active in groups that focus on editing, translation and writing. A practicing author’s editor, Dr. Burrough-Boenisch is the author of many articles publishing in English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Written Communication and European Science Editor. burrough@bos.nl


What do editors’ associations do? What do editors want them to do? I will address these questions from the perspective of language professionals who do not live in Anglophone countries but whose business is to produce effective and acceptable English. I will draw heavily on the experience of SENSE (the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors in the Netherlands), which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year. Though SENSE revolves around only one language/culture combination (Dutch and English), whereas METM will have to accommodate many more, there could be ways in which METM could profit from the SENSE experience.