Dragonfly staff and clients know Scottie Kersta-Wilson for her talents as a medical writer and editor. But there’s a whole other side to Scottie. Actually, there are several. Make that many. Scottie grew up an Army brat. She spent most of her formative years in Houston, but she also has fond memories of the American school she attended in Germany …
Pecha Kucha: Breathing creative life into the Dayton community year after year
For years now, the city of Dayton has played host to a uniquely named and unconventionally creative event: Pecha Kucha. The event, owing its odd name to the Japanese words for “chit chat,” was founded in Tokyo in 2003, and has since spread to over 1,000 cities worldwide. Locally, it promotes creative thought and conversation within the Dayton area by …
Levels of Edit
Editing is critical to any successful publication—whether it’s a website, white paper, newsletter, or blog. An editor’s job is to craft clean, error-free copy and ensure that the author’s message is clear. Different types of editing are used throughout the publishing process. Here’s a guide to the levels of edit and what each one accomplishes. You can download the PDF file …
Embracing the flaws of PowerPoint
Graphic design can be fun. But, as with any job, there are tasks that are undoubtedly more cringe-inducing than enjoyable. For me, designing presentations in PowerPoint used to be one of them. Not anymore. Thanks to an enlightening webinar series by BrightCarbon, I’ve learned to enjoy (if not love) Microsoft’s omnipresent and much maligned presentation software. Our leader here at …
Questions for Dragonfly Owner Samantha Enslen
This post was originally published on the Copyediting blog in 2014. Samantha Enslen has been working in the publishing and editing world for nearly 20 years. She currently runs Dragonfly Editorial, an agency that provides copywriting and editing for scientific, medical, technical, and corporate materials. How did you get into editing, Sam? In the early 1990s, I was working at a coffee …
Dragonfly’s Copyediting Checklist
Copyediting can be daunting. Not only do you need to check spelling and grammar, you need to ensure consistency, fix acronyms, improve readability … even make sure that URLs work! A checklist can help. Here’s the checklist we developed at Dragonfly. It’s helped us increase the quality and consistency of our editing. We hope it helps you, as well. You can …
Dragonfly’s Kim Yowler is a technical writer with class
Kim Yowler is fearless when it comes to writing assignments. Where most would find the exacting requirements of a government proposal overwhelming, she’s the queen of compliance. And while the thought of a classroom full of new writers would send many running for the hills, she’s the superintendent of skill-building. The south central Ohio native began her career with a …
Best soundtracks for writing and editing, courtesy of the Dragonfly crew
Working from home may be music to one’s ears, but Dragonflies know that what’s playing in the background can be crucial to productivity. An informal survey of our staff revealed that we use a variety of sound strategies—from total quiet to eclectic music, baseball games, and podcasts—to maintain focus. Here’s what keeps the Dragonflies humming. THE SOUNDS OF …
Polishing a Print Publication: Four Lessons Learned the Hard Way
For editors like me—who usually work in Microsoft Word—jumping into the management of a designed publication can be a shock. That’s what happened to me when I took over Tracking Changes, the journal of ACES: The Society for Editing. I knew all the must-dos for print publishing theoretically, but it had been a long time since I had put them into practice. …
Getting proposals right: horizontal vs. vertical editing
I talked with David Bol from Shipley Associates a few years ago about proposal editing. For a proposal guy, he had a lot of insights on editing. That should come as no surprise; after all, he’s a senior VP at Shipley and has managed the content on hundreds of bids. One of the distinctions David made was between what he …