Stephanie Ernst
Freelance Editor, Writer, Blogger, and All-Around Nerd
Meet the Word Nerd
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
-Virginia Woolf
I inherited from my father an insatiable passion for books and for
learning, and I was lucky that my family encouraged these tendencies in me
during my childhood and adolescence, that every time I finished the
last book my father had suggested, he was ready to pull down and hand over
another treasure from his homemade bookshelves. The result? Though I
still pored over many of the same books my childhood friends read, I
was simultaneously engrossed in a wider variety of works
that informed my development as an avid and persistently curious
reader—and writer. And as soon as I was old enough to understand my
English teachers' explanations of "nominative" and "objective," I began
relentlessly correcting the grammar of both my siblings and my parents,
to the irritation of everyone around me. And 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.
I am a meticulous editor and writer with a keen eye for matters of grammar, usage, punctuation, style, flow, and content in need of tweaking. Good writing and good editing are about much more than the technicalities, and I can tailor my own writing to fit clients' needs and can help refine and polish an author's writing while maintaining the author's own style, voice, and intentions. I enjoy my work, and I invest myself in it, and this shows in the high-quality results my clients have come to expect from me. My editing projects have included dozens of nonfiction and fiction book manuscripts on a wide variety of subjects, professional journals, academic encyclopedias, instructional manuals and guides, and articles and course materials for a professional Web site. I have researched and written more than two hundred brief biographical essays for a reference publication as well as the introductions and chapter summaries for reference texts. I contributed a column on companion animal issues to a St. Louis area newspaper from early 2008 to mid-2009, and I began daily blogging and community management for Animal Rights at Change.org in the summer of 2008.
I also have past experience in public relations, and because of a background in the field of law, I am familiar with legal writing and research. Some areas of particular interest and experience for me are literary criticism and scholarship, animal rights, environmentalism and conservation, LGBT rights, social justice, 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.
I am a meticulous editor and writer with a keen eye for matters of grammar, usage, punctuation, style, flow, and content in need of tweaking. Good writing and good editing are about much more than the technicalities, and I can tailor my own writing to fit clients' needs and can help refine and polish an author's writing while maintaining the author's own style, voice, and intentions. I enjoy my work, and I invest myself in it, and this shows in the high-quality results my clients have come to expect from me. My editing projects have included dozens of nonfiction and fiction book manuscripts on a wide variety of subjects, professional journals, academic encyclopedias, instructional manuals and guides, and articles and course materials for a professional Web site. I have researched and written more than two hundred brief biographical essays for a reference publication as well as the introductions and chapter summaries for reference texts. I contributed a column on companion animal issues to a St. Louis area newspaper from early 2008 to mid-2009, and I began daily blogging and community management for Animal Rights at Change.org in the summer of 2008.
I also have past experience in public relations, and because of a background in the field of law, I am familiar with legal writing and research. Some areas of particular interest and experience for me are literary criticism and scholarship, animal rights, environmentalism and conservation, LGBT rights, social justice, 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.
Copyright . Stephanie A. Ernst. All rights reserved.
