About Jan

I’ve been working with words all my life—but not always in anything like my current roles as communications consultant / web content manager / writer / editor for nonprofit organizations.

I went to the University of Iowa…well, because of in-state tuition, frankly, but also because it was home to the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. I thought I would become, if not The Great American Novelist, at least An American Novelist. But my first exposure to Great Literature disabused me of that notion, and I cast about for other ways to make money off a love of words.

I since have taught English to seventh graders in an urban parochial school, to hordes of college freshmen, and to adults in both college and pre-college programs. I served for a time as a Lutheran minister, where a feel for the poetry of language made me a reasonably good preacher. I worked very briefly for ETS, learning one of the most demanding forms of writing: the five-option test question. (You may hate me if you struggled with the GRE or LSAT, but not the SAT—I didn’t write for that test.)  I got a lot of work out of that test development experience, writing both real tests and test preparation materials for a variety of publishers.

Though I started my editorial career as a freelance proofreader for book publishers, I quickly moved to copyediting and then to developmental editing, which is my real forte: working with an author to clarify audience and purpose, hone ideas, and organize material for effective presentation.

That, plus the ability to schedule a publication and keep it moving to that schedule, is what brought me back into the nonprofit arena where I belong. I started by editing newsletters and journals for education-related nonprofits. From publishing such print materials because “it’s what an organization like ours does,” we moved gradually to developing a strategic communications program.

Obviously website content management is a major part of such a program. As the world moves online, my career and expertise have gone with it, so that an ever-increasing part of my work is writing for the web and working with designers to set up structures and navigation so users can find what they want.

A strategic communications program usually includes media outreach. It almost always involves creating an array of communication tools, in print and online, to help organizations tell their stories. It definitely involves a lot of collaboration among numerous stakeholders, and fortunately I’m an extroverted introvert who can get a lot of decisions made in a meeting and then go back to my office to write for a week.

That’s the sort of thing I have been doing these past ten years for a variety of clients and employers. That’s what I can do for you.