Published September 20, 2025 

Language lovers, editing enthusiasts, curiosity seekers, lend me your ears, eyes or screen readers. ACES 2026 will be here sooner than you think.

What is ACES 2026? It’s the 10-years-later edition of ACES 2016, which I attended in Portland. What is ACES? Formerly the American Copy Editors Society, it’s now The Society for Editing. The annual conference is its Super Bowl.

I’m a big fan.

Have you ever wondered, “Why is this an English language rule? Is it still a rule?” If so, ACES might be a good fit for you. If you get angry when you learn that a rule you were taught 30 years ago doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, ACES might not be a comfortable fit.

But if you plan on working with words for another five, 10, 20 years, you might want to check it out so you can stay relevant. Newsrooms and their overlords don’t hold continuing education in language usage in high esteem, so don’t expect a pat on the back.

Once more, with feeling: If you want to write and edit for readers who are alive and not for mentors and teachers who are dead, editing associations are the way to go. ACES is the Cadillac, in my experience.

That does not mean you can drive it on the freeway. We’ll get to that in a future post

Wait, that was 10 years ago?

In late 2015, I decided to invest in my professional future by attending ACES 2016 in Portland. There was little doubt I needed it.

CBS had laid off me and all of my remote-editing teammates in July 2013, and we’d thought it was the job of the future. Suddenly, early on a Tuesday morning, it was in the past tense. We were done.

So I dusted off my Twitter account and began to follow top editors around the world. Most of them did not work in newsrooms — these editors had long before left zombie rules and outdated thinking about language in the dust. I didn’t want to be a dinosaur, and I was hungry to get up to speed on best practices.

I participated in or lurked silently in ACES chats and other language discussions online. Bit by bit, I discovered that so many “rules” I’d learned in journalism had no real basis other than “that’s the way I was taught.” Not much thought beyond that. Probably too busy.

Rules, I also learned, are easy to follow if you’d prefer to never have to do your own thinking.

I sat in the front row

Yes, I was that eager beaver.

During ACES 2016, I got to meet the editors I’d been learning from online and through books. Bill Walsh, who signed my copy of his “Lapsing Into a Comma,” answered a few of my style questions in a hallway as we waited for one of the sessions to begin.

Walsh was funny and loved to teach veteran editors about what they were getting wrong, where they were being heavy-handed, and I miss him. He died in March 2017, less than a year after the ACES in Portland. I still review the basics of his session, “Rookie Mistakes Even Veterans Make.” And I keep in mind that his presentation is almost a decade old now.

Lisa McLendon of the University of Kansas Bremner Editing Center presided over a similar session, titled “Sweat This, Not That: Real Rules vs. Grammar Myths.” It was interesting to see heads exploding throughout the room as she debunked those myths, one by one. People’s long-held pet peeves lay wounded on the floor.

This was five years after she shook up people by writing, relative to the “rules” about splitting an infinitive or compound verb:

Split away — there’s no basis in English grammar not to, and it often sounds stilted or unnatural to work around this false prohibition. As Tom F. put it on Twitter, “Nuttiest are the people who still haven’t realised that the infinitive, like the atom, can be split with productive effects.”

I mean, the things people are taught to believe and inflict on others.

ACES can handle your debunking needs

As difficult as it’s made working in newsrooms that are stuck in the past, wandering scary streets with the zombies, I’m so glad I expanded my editing horizons.

I work for the reader, not to serve a poorly constructed rule book.

Speaking of books, ACES 2016 was directly and indirectly responsible for some great additions to my collection.

Some of those found their way into my hands because, well, it’s not 2016 anymore. It’s definitely not 1956 anymore, when many of the “rules” in modern newsrooms should have been launched into the sun.

Also, it wasn’t always the case, but most ACES members work outside of what we call journalism. They edit books, medical publications and websites, corporate communications and so many other forms of expressing and sharing information.

Anyway, ACES 2026 will be in Atlanta in late April. It’s not the only learning opportunity via ACES. Check out the website or the LinkedIn account to find out more. And if you can guess the double meaning of “Sexist Creeps” in the session title on the notebook page in the featured image, ACES might be for you.

People who’ve attended the annual conferences rave about the learning, but also the connections they’ve made, and all of the related benefits of professional networks. I can’t recommend it enough.

If I were feeling better and could type, I’d polish this blog post and strip away the cliches, but I wanted to dictate it and get it to you sooner rather than later. Don’t be surprised to see updates later. In fact, you should probably count on it. I might quote a few ACES members if I can get their permission.

Sending love.

♥

Thank you

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