Making the technical and unintelligible clear and interesting is a specialty. The many long copy projects have included:

Business in Focus magazine – T-Mobile
Newsletters – LG, 3Com, LAN2LAN
Long copywriting, including whitepapers, brochures, sales tools, scripts and more – Logica, Canon, Orange, T-Mobile, 3Com, Symantec, Barclays

 

“I believe that old managers are old managers…But that doesn’t mean to say there shouldn’t be an older head there, sitting on the back of the stagecoach, occasionally letting off the blunderbuss to let everyone know there’s an Indian out there.”

Sir John Harvey Jones – Independent on Sunday: Detective stalks corridors of industry read article

Other business writing for newspapers: Today, The Sun, Liverpool Daily Post & Echo

Copywriter, editor and project manager for two years with Lotus Gold (www.lotus-gold.com) an independently-voiced website covering business and technology issues. Developed content strategy and managed the editorial process.
Here’s some sample material.

Strategy Papers:
Knowledge matters-developing a KM strategy
How to handle the knowledge deficit – the cost to a business of what it doesn’t know. (PDF, 72K)

eCollaboration – the evolution of the Extranet
How the Internet is redefining the traditional notion of competition.
(PDF, 67K)

Marketing on the Web
The core tools needed for marketing online and how to evaluate their effectiveness. (PDF, 73K)

Case Study: The Godfather falls for Notes and Domino
(PDF 60K)

Feature: Clusters to pay their way
After the LAN and the WAN comes the SAN. (PDF, 235K)

Review: Suites stakes
IBM’s rival offering to Microsoft’s Small Business Server. (PDF, 335K)

Opinion: No need to be catty…
Bruce Willis, Burgers and Bandwidth. (Article)

Windows 7 updates

Latest on the shelves… some Windows 7 updates together with new articles on social networks for How to do just about anything on a Computer for Reader’s Digest.

Reader’s Digest Books

As technical and editorial consultant I have compiled several books about PCs and the Internet, for the Reader’s Digest. The work includes writing new features, as well as rewriting and updating content

Beginner’s Guide to Home Computing – updated for Microsoft Windows Vista
A friendly guide for the novice user to setting up, starting and using a computer. Includes many “how to” articles on everything from word processing to home finance.

The PC Problem Solver
A troubleshooting guide to help even the most technophobic reader deal with common computer problems.

Get More from Your PC
Having bought the PC and learnt how to handle some common problems this next book in the Reader’s Digest series turns beginners into power users.

Sample entry:
Tiling Background Image
Just as tiling can add a decorative effect to your kitchen or bathroom, so it can to the background of your Web page. What’s more you only need one tile, whatever space you have to cover.

The way it works is for a single small image (“tile”) to be downloaded which can be repeated infinitely, however big the page. This process, known as tiling, is also a good way of creating a layered effect on the Web, as text, graphics and links can go over the top of the tiled background.

However, you need to bear in mind the contrast between the text and the image underneath. If you have a light background use dark type, or light type if you have a dark background. The background tiles should also be consistently dark or light. Otherwise if you have a mixture neither the dark or light type is going to show up reliably. The code to add a background tile is but like the debutante at the ball, you do need to decide if you want to show the seams. A tile with seams has a wallpaper style effect. It has an obvious border. To create seamless tiles is a lot trickier, but graphics tools, such as Adobe’s ImageReady do make the process easier.

Sample entry:

ASCII Art…
Just as the original cave dwellers crafted their paintings out of unlikely materials, good old plain text has also been developed as decorative art.

The punctuation characters and spaces from ASCII have been crafted into illustrations to reflect the feelings of people writing in chat rooms, newsgroups or emails.

The smiley face (code) (/code) created using a colon, hyphen and closing bracket was the first, but now a whole dictionary of expressions has emerged. They have also gone from simply portraying emotion (emoticons) to physical description, e.g. (:-))))))))))) someone wearing a tie, and even objects such as >[] to represent a television.