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 has made over 2,000 appearances as the resident word expert on C4's Countdown, and comments regularly on TV and radio on words in the news. She has contributed to discussions on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, 15 x 15, Word of Mouth, More or Less, Today, and on Radio 5 Live's Breakfast and Drive programmes, and has been a regular panellist on R4's Wordaholics. She also frequently hosts shows on Radio Oxford.She has made guest appearances on many TV programmes including BBC Breakfast, Newsnight, This Morning and The One Show.
Susie answers notes and queries about words and phrases each week for the Radio Times, and writes a weekly column for mentalfloss.com. She has written for the Independent on Sunday, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and is the author of several books, including TThe Language Report, Susie Dent's Word of the Year, What Made the Crocodile Cry?, Weird Words (for children) and How to Talk Like a Local. She is currently researching another book for John Murray. She contributed to the BBC's nationwide survey on local dialects, Voices, and has been a judge on the Costa Book Awards and on the Academy Excellence Awards. She is a past President of the Samuel Johnson Society.
Susie was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in January 2016.