Copy editing can be a stressful profession—especially when unexpected problems arise (feline or otherwise). Please share EAC Toronto branch’s first promotional video, starring Mellow the cat, with your fellow editors on social media, and let us know if you can relate in the comments.
Video: Copy editor vs. cat
- Tagged
- copy editor
- video
Published by Editors Toronto
We are the Toronto branch of Editors Canada — the only national association devoted to editors and the editing profession, with more than 1,300 members across the country and more than 300 in Ontario. Editors Toronto is an active, vibrant group of freelance and in-house editors who work with organizations and individuals in the corporate, not-for-profit, technical, government, digital, publishing, and academic sectors in Canada and around the world in a variety of languages. We meet on the last Wednesday of every month, except in June, July, August, and December, for an engaging program followed by discussion and networking opportunities. View all posts by Editors Toronto
Published
BoldFace 
Well done! I can definitely relate. I used to do much of my editing on paper, and I’ve always had cats. So we’ve gone through multiple situations together. The worst was when a cat spilled my drink on the paper I was editing. That happened more than once till I finally learned to keep my drink in a safe place. Now I’m retired, but still have cats. Today one cat made a bad jump and knocked two blossoms off an amaryllis plant. Another played with my pencil and batted it across the room and under the kitchen stove. Happily, I no longer have to deal with tight deadlines or on-paper editing, so can enjoy my cats’ antics. Overall, our four cats are stress reducers–they help keep me and my partner sane.
– Patsy in Calgary
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This is a perfectly awful video. Oh, the technical aspects are good, and the cat is adorable. But the video is insulting your prospective members by implying they’re as clueless, incompetent, and disrespectful of their clients as this woman. The whole video is just sending a really repugnant message. “We’ll give you the skills you need to stay calm when you’re on deadline.” First, one cannot “give” skills to someone. Did professional editors really write this? Second, the implication that a person who is so incompetent that she has one red pen only in her possession is a prospective member of the organization of editors is insulting to those editors who are not as clueless. I have never seen any video purporting to impress prospective members of an organization that serves the opposite purpose quite as well as this one does. People are praising this terrible thing. It’s a scandal that they are doing so. It’s just awful, and if the Toronto chapter wants to retain any credibility, it should quietly remove this from its site and reconsider its judgment about what kind of message it wants to send about editors TO editors.
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I just saw this as a cute cat-editor video. Thanks to comments by other editors, I see what I missed–this is supposed to be promotional. I’m not sure of anything positive that it is promoting.
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Hmmm…. the production is good, but the message is missed. The story doesn’t work towards the promo purpose.
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This is a cute, funny promo video. I like it.
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