Pam Peters

Biography

Pam Peters is an Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University – where she held a Personal Chair in Linguistics until retiring in 2007. She was Director of Macquarie University’s Dictionary Research Centre (2001-07), and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Macquarie Dictionary (1986-2006). She continues to serve on the editorial boards of English World-Wide and English Today, and was editor of the Australian Style newsletter (1992-2008). In other professional roles, she is a member of the ABC’s Language Committee (formerly SCOSE), a Distinguished Editor of Australia’s Institute of Professional Editors, and contributed 6 chapters to the Australian Government Style Manual (2002). She led the compilation of reference corpora of Australian English as empirical support for researching Australian usage.  They inform her numerous research papers and major monographs: Cambridge Guide to Australian Style (1996), revised as Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007), and their international counterpart, her best-selling Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004). Her current research interests are in varieties of English in the Indo-Pacific (the VEIP project endorsed by the Union Academique Internationale), and the readability of health messaging for the general public, along with creating online termbanks in cancer medicine HealthTermFinder and in family law LawTermFinder.