V I D A   D E   P A L A B R A S

EDITING & WRITING SERVICES

Providing freelance copyediting, substantive editing, writing, and research

The logophile, or lover of words, to the right is your resident editor and writer, Stephanie Ernst, and the canine and lover of squirrels at my side is Chance.  Chance is neither an editor nor a writer, though she has been known to rest her head on my laptop and type a bit with her nose while I'm trying to work and to serve as occasional inspiration for writings.

My other inspirations and leanings toward this field have been present since my childhood, when I first started showing signs of becoming a future wordsmith. I inherited from my father an insatiable passion for books and for learning, and I was lucky that he encouraged these tendencies in me, that every time I finished the last book he'd suggested, he was ready to pull down and hand over another treasure from his homemade bookshelves. The result? Though I still pored over many of the same books my childhood friends read, I was simultaneously engrossed in a wider variety of more mature works that informed my development as an avid and persistently curious reader—and writer. And as soon as I was old enough to understand my English teachers' explanations of "nominative" and "objective," I began relentlessly correcting the grammar of both my siblings and my parents, to the irritation of everyone around me. And yes, in grammar courses during high school and college, I even enjoyed and looked forward to diagramming sentences. I'm a word nerd. And I'm comfortable with that.

Following a childhood of writing stories, I tried writing my first book, a children's tale about a town of blue-collar ghosts living in an invisible world, with a portal in a little girl's closet, when I was in seventh grade. The Commodore 64 crashed and took all seven completed chapters with it. I eventually recovered from my twelve-year-old self's devastation, and today I am back in the field I've loved since childhood.

After earning my degree in English, dabbling in publishing, and selling my soul for too long in the legal field, I decided to follow my longtime passions and began working as a freelance editor, writer, and researcher. I am a meticulous editor and writer with a keen eye for matters of grammar, usage, punctuation, style, flow, and content in need of tweaking. Good writing and good editing are about much more than the technicalities, and I can tailor my own writing to fit clients' needs and can help refine and polish an author's writing while maintaining the author's own style, voice, and intentions. I enjoy my work, and I invest myself in it, and this shows in the high-quality results my clients have come to expect from me.

My editing projects have included dozens of nonfiction and fiction book manuscripts on a wide variety of subjects, several academic encyclopedias, instructional manuals and guides, and articles and course materials for a professional Web site. I have researched and written more than two hundred brief biographical essays for a reference publication about authors as well as the introduction and chapter summaries for a reference text. I also have significant past experience in public relations, and because of my background in the field of law, I am additionally skilled in legal writing and research.

Some areas of particular interest and experience for me are literature, animal rights, environmentalism and conservation, biodiversity, LGBT rights, social justice, women's studies, history, law, and education, but as a perpetual student of all subjects, I enjoy working on projects covering a range of topics. Indeed, this is why I love my job: I get to constantly read and learn for a living. For an intensely curious word nerd, it doesn't get much better than that.