• 30+ years of professional writing and editing

• Diverse copywriting experience spans marketing and product

• Flexible voice, having written for many brands

• 2,000+ hours writing content specifically for a mobile app

• Exceptional grasp of grammar, punctuation, and style

• SEO copywriting certificate from Yoast

• UX Writing Essentials course from UX Writing Hub

• Readily team with designers, engineers, subject-matter experts

Copy that people grasp quickly is a must. So, great copywriting doesn’t start with clever phrases or sales tricks. It starts with clarity.

For me, clarity is more than a practical matter. It represents a kind of integrity in a world where so much communication undermines, disrespects, or outright abuses the power of language. 

My clarity as a copywriter is built on the foundation of two previous careers: journalism and copyediting. Journalism taught me to get to the heart of complex issues in a single paragraph — and revealed that I was quick study. A decade of full-time copyediting gave me a technical command of the language that brings precision to every sentence.

My clients have included marketing firms, businesses, and nonprofits — local, national, and international. I deliver top-quality copy for marketing websites, articles, brochures, email campaigns, courses, and more.

I’ve worked in many spaces, including homeownership, green building, addiction, systems change, publishing, personal development, and social services.

Backstory

Journalism

I spent most of my journalism years with a Cape Cod, Massachusetts, newspaper, covering historic Provincetown. What a beat! I tackled topics as diverse as whale research, tourism, special education, homelessness, and AIDS.

Today, the same agility is on display in my copywriting. 

Copyediting

My copyediting career started with freelance-editing a couple dozen nonfiction books for publishers in Chicago, New York, and Boston. I then joined, and eventually ran, the copy desk of then Disney-owned FamilyFun magazine.

People tend to think copyediting is all about rules. It’s really about your reader. When a rule doesn’t serve your reader (or, sometimes, your design), you break it. And when you understand the rules, as I do, you can break them without breaking the writing.

Genes?

My grandfather was a big deal at the famed Chicago agency Leo Burnett in its early days. As in the “Mad Men” era. Among his accounts was Kraft Foods, and I’m told it was his idea to put holes in Kraft’s then newfangled processed Swiss cheese.

Those holes must have looked good on my grandfather’s résumé, but I wouldn’t want them on mine. Today, the Holy Grail of marketing is authenticity. And it’s a good thing, because I couldn’t have made the leap from writing about homelessness and AIDS to spinning fake holes in fake cheese. (Sorry, Granddad!)