About Me

I'm an Australian and US citizen who has worked as a technical writer and instructional designer since 2004. In between running and doing creative writing for fun and working on fixed term contract for a consultancy company, I run my business to help people use words as weapons, feather dusters and light bulbs (for the aha! moments). Well, weapons might be going a bit far, though I did help to write instruction manuals for a weapons system. I live in Querétaro, Mexico. I don't use Facebook because I don't think anyone cares what I'm doing. Which is mostly just walking my dog.

My background

Memberships

Apart from getting newsletters and emails from these people, I am as a member of the following professional organisations:

• Associate member of Canberra Society of Editors
• Australian Society for Technical Communication
• ACT Writers Centre

Qualifications

So, how do you know that I'm any good? Well qualifications are a start:

• University of Canberra: Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing. Units in editing, creative writing, scriptwriting and poetry.
• Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training: so I can write training doco, gosh I can even do the stand-up and talk bit.
• University of Canberra: Bachelor of Industrial Design: almost completely irrelevant, but it proves I can stick to something for four years (literally! we used a lot of Araldite).
• Australian National University: Bachelor of Arts (one year) I loved that my film studies lecture was to watch a film, but realised writing essays all the time wasn't my cup of tea (and I like my tea).

How I work

If people call me a witch, then it's not because I use a magic wand to write, edit and design. There's a little more magic that goes into your job.

Writing
I can:

• research and reference for information-based writing (eg health articles/blogs)
• publish to WordPress and supply HTML versions for webpages
• produce graphic montages to accompany articles

Editing
I can:

• edit your document online using track changes
• edit your document on paper using proofreader mark-up

Instructional Design

I can...

• do a training needs analysis and training management plan
• prepare course outlines
• write storyboards based on existing material, edit existing storyboards to improve the learning effectiveness
• develop eLearning using Articulate and Captivate
• do user acceptance testing for eLearning: I love finding bugs!