I’ve always had a knack for writing, spelling, and remembering the rules of grammar, and for the last 20+ years I’ve been supporting people I worked with (and for) with those skills. Here are a few examples:
On active duty (I was an intelligence officer in the Air Force), I was selected for a year-long position creating bi-weekly briefings for the Lt. General and several other senior staff. I researched current topics of interest, wrote up a detailed script, and – with multiple rounds of review from the senior staff in my department – put together PowerPoint slides for the final presentation.
While working at the Harvard School of Public Health, I drafted and edited correspondence for the Associate Dean I worked for, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith. I also helped her and her co-author, Dr. Howard Spivak, with initial edits to their book Murder Is No Accident: Understanding and Preventing Youth Violence in America, incorporating their changes and offering up suggestions where I could see opportunities to improve wording.
At Mackenzie Engineering in Portland, Oregon, I spent 3 1/2 years proofreading and copyediting the letters, proposals, contracts (scope of work only; the legalese was not my responsibility), and many different kinds of reports sent out from the architects, engineers, and other technical staff to clients, contractors, jurisdictions, and other external contacts. Documents ranged from very short letters to 100+ page planning narratives, and most of them had to be returned to their author within 1 or 2 business days – along with the other 10-20+ that came into the queue on a daily basis. I reviewed the content and ensured the documents conformed to our internal style, as well as helped new coworkers understand how to use our templates. I made major updates to my department’s user manual and created new templates from time to time when a department had a new need. Most of the work was done in Word, but there were a handful of projects a year that required InDesign.
When I worked at Moonfire and Sun Garden Center in Bend, Oregon, I redesigned the monthly email newsletter to improve legibility and match the company colors. I also produced it each month for over a year, soliciting content from coworkers, editing it, and doing research and writing for new articles as necessary. This piece I wrote for National Pollinator Month is one of my favorites. In addition, I put together graphic standards for the company, developed standard document layouts to advertise events to customers and provide routine updates to staff, and created several new pieces of signage to present clear, cohesive information about plants available for sale.
In numerous other positions at places like MIT and the Immune Disease Institute (now the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine), I’ve drafted and/or edited correspondence, PowerPoint slides, and articles for scientific journals. At Millennium Pharmaceuticals, I worked on graphics for slides and convention presentations, concept designs for several project logos, and designed and produced an internal print newsletter.
Since 2013, I’ve done document layout work in InDesign for the Native Plant Society of Oregon. I worked on the Bulletin newsletter for 5 years and currently work on the annual journal Kalmiopsis.
I have a BA in mathematics from the University of Portland, a Masters in Architecture from the University of Colorado Denver, and completed a Permaculture Design Course offered by the Planet Repair Institute in Portland, Oregon.