Honorary members
From its establishment, the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) honoured some of its members for the contributions they made to the Society and/or to the editorial profession in general. In addition, it singled out two people – the honorary president and the honorary vice-president – from outside the membership to honour in the same way.
The SfEP committee and later the SfEP Council recommended these individuals, who were then elected to honorary membership at an annual general meeting.
Honorary members can take advantage of all the CIEP's benefits and attend training courses and conferences for a preferential fee. They don't have to pay an annual subscription – although it has become a tradition that most, if not all, of the honorary members make ex gratia payments to the Institute annually equal to or more than the subscriptions they would have paid.
At the 2011 AGM, the membership voted that new honorary members would no longer be elected from within the membership. This means that the CIEP now only has an honorary president and an honorary vice-president. To honour the contributions of CIEP members, the Judith Butcher Award was established.
David Crystal OBE
David Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject of language and lectures to audiences throughout the world.
He is a prolific author with more than 100 books to his credit, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. In 2009 he published a linguistic autobiography, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through. His most recent books include Words in Time and Place (2014), The Disappearing Dictionary (2015), and Making a Point: the Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015). He has also been a consultant on, contributor to or presenter of numerous radio and television programmes and series.
Honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and former president of the Society of Indexers, David Crystal was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in September 2004 and then honorary president in January 2016.
Susie Dent
Susie Dent is a writer and broadcaster on language. She recently celebrated thirty years as a co-presenter and the resident word expert on C4's Countdown, and also appears on the show's comedy sister 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown. Susie comments regularly on TV and radio on words in the news, and has regular columns in the Radio Times, The Week Junior, and the i paper. She is the author of several non-fiction books on words and language, and her first novel, Guilty By Definition, published last year. She is proud to be an honorary member of the CIEP.
Susie was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in January 2016.