Portfolio Overview

For more than a decade, I wrote freelance feature articles for magazines and daily newspapers. When I switched to corporate work, starting in 1995, I first stuck to editing, mostly, because it fits more naturally with my journalistic and writing style than marketing copy. Then Karen Gold, in London, lured me back to writing with the irresistible offer of becoming editor of Internet Content newsletter. I edited that newsletter — and researched and wrote nearly all of it, too — from when it launched in 2000 to when it folded in 2001, along with so many other noble endeavors in the lamentably short-lived era when people continually declared "content is king" on the Web. (To me, it still is. Even in e-commerce, the whole point of having a Web site is the content. The technology is merely what makes it work.)

Hereafter, I'll be writing new health-related articles monthly, which you'll find in the Recent Articles section. Most of the stories under Feature Articles in the Portfolio Samples section were published by magazines or daily newspapers, so they show a wider range of writing styles and subjects, which I hope you'll find interesting, maybe even entertaining. Some of my favorites aren't relevant to the purposes of this site at all, so I've tucked them away off the Personal Proclivities page, under — what else? — Favorite Stories.

I hope you'll understand that when you're the sole creator and have deadlines for clients, creating a site with this much content means you have to choose between two undesirable alternatives:

• You either never get the site up, or
• You just go ahead and launch it, then keep building it as you find the time, in between paying projects.

I've done the latter, for better or for worse. Nonetheless, you'll find a stash of several other kinds of samples of my work already. Here's the full lineup of subsections, in case you don't have JavaScript enabled and can't see the drop-down menus when your mouse cursor rolls over the title of the main sections at the left of your screen:

Books tells you about the only book I can claim sole authorship for (and I'm likely to keep it that way, given that experience) and what reviewers said about it, but mentions the chapters I've written in three other books. There are also links to three excerpts from my book, The Woman's Guide to Online Services (McGraw-Hill, 1995)

Newsletters gives you a roundup of some of the newsletters I've written, edited or published (or all three), with links to many articles.

Web Sites and Editorial Content Plans pages aren't complete yet. The latter won't be for a while, because I'm working on content redesigns for two clients and can't show those until they've relaunched their sites. So for now, these are both placeholder pages, but I'll upload info about other sites I've worked on soonest.

Feature Articles, which I covered above.

Patient Education tells you a bit about what kinds of materials I've edited for Kaiser Permanente and shows a patient handout about endoscopy that I did as an American Medical Writers Association workshop project. I can't post proprietary materials I've written for clients, of course.

Reports will show a couple of different kinds of ergonomic evaluation reports for Ergovera Ergonomics Consulting (as soon as I have time to eliminate certain identifying info, at the client's reasonable request, and convert them to PDF format) and a couple of HIPAA documents eventually, perhaps, contingent upon clients' permission.

Technical Editing will provide both a listing of the kinds of documents I've edited and for which companies (mostly for Cisco Systems, Netscape Communications, Juniper Networks and Vocera Communications). However, I usually show samples only by special arrangement or in person, both because I can't legally provide online samples of proprietary and confidential documents and because, out of professional courtesy to writers and clients, I don't publicly display editing markups, at least not without special permission.

Marcom Copy is something I rarely write, although I have done several product launch promos, as e-mail, for Netscape Communications. I've edited nearly every kind of marcom copy for various corporations, though — even a beach towel that was a gift for channel partners who attended a Cisco conference in Florida.

Please check the Clients and Kudos section, too, where you'll find a listing of various kinds of clients and what they've said about my work for them, as well as a listing of awards I've received from professional associations and others.

In recognition of creativity, integrity and excellence on the Web.