Writing & Editing
Throughout my professional career I’ve delved into product support, web development, training and coaching (in a variety of softwares and content management systems), IT consultancy, SEO consultancy and management, social media and general marketing consultancy, and a variety of other industries. Uniting all of the industries I’ve been a part of is a deeply-seeded desire to communicate, teach and explain how things work.
I am at my most confident when I am devising or documenting a procedure, explaining why an online utility is useful to someone who needs it, assisting others in structuring their writing (be it blog post or story), and writing my own commentaries, for fun. I believe that it’s through the combination of developing my problem-solving, training, and coding abilities that enables me to write and edit.
I offer writing and editing services through Equivalent Exchange in a variety of capacities.
1. Technical Writing
This is where I take a technical procedure – such as how to edit content on your website – and document it in a step-by-step manner, including diagrams where deemed necessary. Technical writing involves elements of problem solving, and requires a consistent writing style. Terminology needs to be broken down to a level that the intended audience will understand.
Examples of my technical writing can be found in my custom manuals that I provide to clients at the end of every web development job. Here’s a segment from the manual I provided Liliana Stafford prior to her site going live: Excerpt from documentation created for lilianastafford.com.
2. Blog post writing
I love this type of writing – but who doesn’t? You get to write conversationally about things you are passionate about. I’ve written blog posts for my own blogs (for fun), and professionally for (zero)seven.
- My blog posts on OMG! Squee are mostly reviews of TV shows, games or movies that I love,
- My blog posts on Equivalent Exchange are largely about life as a web developer / geek, with the odd bit Eurovision thrown in,
- My blog posts on BSC-Squee! are snarky book reviews of the Baby-Sitters Club books as I re-read them to try figure out what I found so interesting about them as a pre-teen.
3. SEO writing
An important part of any search engine optimisation strategy is the continual addition of relevant, interesting content to a website. Structuring this copy in a way that is both logical and relevant to a reader, and easy to understand by a search engine, takes a different level of concentration and research than other type of writing.
An example of my SEO-focused writing can be found on Trelowarren, throughout the site.
Editing & Research:
My experience in editing has largely been structural and continuity based; fact checking, sequence of events, and that sort of thing. For a couple of years now, I’ve done a little structural and fact-checking style editing for Australian author Isobelle Carmody, most notably for The Sending in 2011. Isobelle appreciated my research into her manuscript to the extent of giving me an acknowledgement in the book (a dream come true):
In 2012 I undertook a Practical Editing course through the Brisbane North Institute of TAFE, to catch anything procedural I might have been missing. But to be perfectly honest I’ve learned much more through the actual editing of people’s writing than through a training course!
Work with me
If you’re interested in having me write or edit anything for you, send me a wave, or fill out the quote form. Pricing varies depending on length of work.