Early in childhood, I developed an insatiable appetite for books, for words, and for learning, and I was lucky that my family encouraged these tendencies in me. My father was always eager to pull down and hand over a treasure from his homemade bookshelves, and no one laughed at or discouraged my grade-school excitement about scribbling fantastical stories on notebook paper or later entrusting them to the beloved Commodore 64. And because of adults’ active involvement in and encouragement of my bibliophilic nature, I spent childhood and adolescence engrossed in a wide variety of works, even beyond those geared toward children, which informed my development as an avid and persistently curious reader. Unsurprisingly, I developed a love of the art of language itself, and as I grew older, I found beauty in the structure of sentences as much as in the content. Yes, in grammar courses during high school and college, I even enjoyed and looked forward to diagramming sentences. I’m a word nerd. And I’m comfortable with that.
As an adult, I have been editing and writing in professional capacities for more than a decade, and I have been freelancing full-time since early 2005 as a meticulous editor and writer with a keen eye and wide-ranging experience. Grammar, usage, punctuation, style, flow, and the like are important matters in writing, and my job as an editor is to help tweak clients’ writing in those areas. That said, good writing and good editing are about much more than the technicalities, so in writing projects, I can tailor my own style to fit clients’ needs, and in editing, my goal is to help refine and polish an author’s work, to make the writing as compelling and clear as it can be, while maintaining the author’s own style, voice, and intentions.
I enjoy my work and invest myself in it, and this shows in the high-quality results my clients have come to expect from me, in editing projects ranging from encyclopedias, scholarly journals, and biographies to trade books, manuals, and professional website content; my editing projects have numbered in the hundreds. Additionally, I have researched and written introductions and biographical essays for reference publications, and I contributed a column on companion animal issues to a newspaper from early 2008 to mid-2009. Between the summer of 2008 and December 2009, I managed the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org, which entailed daily writing, research, networking, and community management.
Some areas of particular interest and experience for me are literary criticism and scholarship, animal rights, veganism, environmentalism and conservation, LGBT issues, social justice, intersectionality, women’s studies, history, law, and education, but as a perpetual student of all subjects, I enjoy working on projects covering a range of topics. Indeed, this is why I love my job: I get to constantly read and learn for a living. For an intensely curious word nerd, it doesn’t get much better than that.
