About Me
I've spent a decade writing and editing for government agencies, including NOAA and NASA. I've spent that time absorbing best practices, focusing on continuous improvement, and mastering different style guides. I've developed strategies to anticipate and mitigate issues, juggle competing and overlapping deadlines, and collaborate with overworked (and sometimes reluctant) subject-matter experts.
Enhancing Content
My editing experience spans time at government agencies, including NASA and NOAA, commercial publishers, textbook publishers, and academic presses. I'm a skilled developmental editor, line editor, copyeditor, and proofreader who specializes in science and technical content.
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My favorite editing experiences come when editors are incorporated at the beginning of the process, rather than handed a manuscript and a hard deadline at the very end. Editors can provide valuable insight into organizing content, avoiding duplication, and creating a holistic message from disparate parts. This is particularly critical when work has been divided among different SMEs, all of whom may have differing ideas on what they want to say.
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At NASA, I led meetings I've come to call "content sprints"—not unlike design sprints and code sprints. Two or three days in a room without distractions, the entire cross-functional team focused on synthesizing research results and data into a cohesive whole. By the end of the "sprint," we had an outline for the team's report and a list of graphics to clarify the main points. These were, in a word, exhausting. But they were an incredibly effective tool to jumpstart the writing process and to incorporate everyone's contributions and opinions.
Content Creation
I've been a writer all my life. From fiction to social media to web articles, I've done it all. During my time at NOAA, I wrote articles—which you can find in my portfolio—for the National Ocean Service website. These articles involved researching and synthesizing information from NOAA sources and elsewhere, distilling the broad set of facts into a cohesive narrative, writing compelling copy, and choosing effective graphics. They were also a lot of fun.
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I've also written executive summaries, as well as executive communication products blog posts, intranet posts, emails to employees, and oral remarks for internal and external audiences. Unfortunately, I cannot share these in my portfolio since they were strictly internal to the agency. But that work gave me skills to excel at managing a content calendar, ghostwriting for leadership, and adapting content to internal and external audiences.
Style and Language Guides
Part of a senior editor's job is to set the tone and guidance for your organization's written content. That includes minutiae like whether to use the Oxford comma (yes, always), but can also cover branding and formatting, ensuring an accessible final product, and fostering equity and inclusivity. Style guides can be especially critical for small teams and teams of inexperienced writers, but the official style guides are often written in dense grammatical language that make them difficult to peruse and find quick answers. I provide custom style guides aimed at teams of tech writers and others who want a consistent, high-quality product without having to look up the difference between a dependent and subjunctive clause.
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I've also written several guides on inclusive language choices and trained colleagues and SMEs in best practices. I researched heavily and collated the preferences of specific groups into one guide, providing lots of links to primary sources on inclusive language, such as the GLAAD Media Reference Guide and the National Association of Black Journalists Style Guide. I also incorporated feedback from others in the office with different perspectives from mine, doing my best to ensure my own implicit biases and assumptions were challenged and addressed.
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Language changes constantly, just as often as society does. When I conduct these trainings, I stress the fact that these guidelines aren't universal, nor will they stay static. But it's important nonetheless for people to begin making more considered choices with their language. It's not easy for someone working in the space industry for 30 years to start saying 'crewed' instead of 'manned', but after reading the guidelines they will at least understand why the change is happening, and I hope they will embrace it.
Ready to elevate your content? Reach out for a personalized consultation and discover how we can collaborate to bring your ideas to life.