What makes an ACES banquet successful?
How about some spirited bidding in the Education Fund silent auction, awards to deserving people in the industry and an entertaining speech by the Grammar Girl?
Plus the food was good.
And here’s how you tell a copy editor is writing about a conference banquet: There aren’t three exclamation points after that last sentence.
Early figures from the Education Fund fundraising efforts show $5,685 donated in table envelopes, around $2,200 collected from the silent auction and $150 raised from Wednesday’s 5K Run to the Desert. Money raised supports the ACES Education Fund’s scholarships for students interested in a career in copy editing.
The 2010 Robinson Prize went to Andy Angelo, news editor of The Grand Rapids Press, and the Glamann Award was presented to Bill Cloud of the University of North Carolina.
ACES 2011 featured a keynote address by Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, who kept the crowd entertained with a multimedia presentation on some moneymaking schemes for the grammar crowd. Grammar slot machines, anyone? Three periods in a row and you get an ellipsis; three exclamation points in a row and you lose. You can count your winnings while watching an infomercial on the comma — commas for sale, for the low, low price of just $19.95, and we’ll throw in the conjunction starter pack.
The evening ended with a big bang — an auction involving PJs owned by Dow Jones News Fund Executive Director Rich Holden. (The jammies, featuring pages from the financial section of a newspaper, come complete with numerous typos.) About the auction, let’s just say that what happens at the ACES banquet, stays at the ACES banquet. But generous and fun-loving copy editors willing to participate in some PJ hijinks raised another $530 for the Education Fund.
