Education is one of the few fields where the writing has to work at every level simultaneously—precise enough for specialists, clear enough for practitioners, and structured well enough that a student, a teacher, or a first responder can find what they need under pressure. The work on this page spans prekindergarten through doctoral level, across mathematics, English language arts, emergency management, and professional development. The subject matter changes. The standard doesn’t.
Primary and Secondary Education
EngageNY through Great Minds (Formerly Common Core, Inc.)
April 2013–July 2014
The editorial challenge on this project was maintaining precision in a subject area whose conventions were still being established. The Prekindergarten through Grade 5 math curriculum was built around a pedagogical framework so new that the authors were establishing its conventions as they wrote. Consequently, the copyeditor had to catch inconsistencies in terminology and word problems that required understanding a way of teaching mathematics most of the country had never encountered.
By design, Jennifer was the sole copyeditor for the first nine months—a deliberate choice rooted in the need for a single consistent editorial voice across six grade levels and more than 30 modules.
The Editorial Style Guidelines, built from a 5-page placeholder into a 32-page working reference with separate versions for copyeditors, formatters, and writers, were the infrastructure that held the project together. The curriculum was published electronically on EngageNY and in print by Jossey-Bass in 2013. Great Minds later developed it into Eureka Math.
EL Education through Scribe Concepts
EL Education’s English Language Arts curriculum is built around a specific instructional philosophy—Expeditionary Learning—with its own vocabulary, pedagogical framing, and expectations for how teachers and students engage with text. Among the EL Education materials produced through Scribe Concepts were the Instructional Practices Companion Guides for Grades K–2, published May 2019. These teacher-facing reference documents were companion resources to EL Education’s Differentiation Packs, designed for use in teacher-led small groups: each guide housed the grade-level instructional practices in explicit format, with assessment conversion charts, year-at-a-glance tables, and sample lesson structures that teachers could adapt for students working above or below grade level. Editing these materials required close attention to Expeditionary Learning voice and pedagogical framing. The format imposed its own demands: a document used under instructional pressure needs to be scannable, not just accurate.
UnboundEd through Scribe Concepts
UnboundEd’s web-based curriculum covered both ELA and mathematics, built on the EngageNY base—the same curriculum Jennifer had worked on at Great Minds, now adapted by UnboundEd for their platform. She edited individual lessons directly in Google Docs, leaving inline comments that UnboundEd content leads reviewed and resolved, on materials spanning Grade 6 ELA and mathematics. The math lessons required handling the same mathematical notation and structure she’d managed at scale on the original EngageNY project. The ELA materials required the same close reading of instructional voice and standards-alignment language as the EL Education work.
Adult Professional Development and Training
UnboundEd Standards Institutes through Scribe Concepts
Winter 2017, Summer 2017, Winter 2018, Summer 2018, Winter 2019, Summer 2019, Winter 2022
Conference presentation decks are a different editorial problem from curriculum materials. The text is spare, the visual relationships matter, and animations add another layer of things that can break. Across seven Standards Institutes spanning Winter 2017 through Winter 2022—UnboundEd’s biannual professional development conferences for educators—Scribe designated Jennifer as the math copyeditor, responsible for decks and handouts across grade bands K–5, Grades 6–8, and high school. Sessions covered topics including focus and coherence, rigor and the Standards for Mathematical Practice, procedural fluency, and making content meaningful, with separate materials per band per session. A formatting error in a math deck doesn’t just look wrong—it looks wrong in front of a room full of math educators—and the grade-banded structure meant any inconsistency multiplied across three or four versions of the same session. In earlier institutes she also covered ELA.
EL Education Professional Development through Scribe Concepts
EL Education’s adoption of the Expeditionary Learning philosophy meant building a new set of professional development courses for teachers, delivered through Canvas. Jennifer edited them directly in the LMS—which meant working in the markup, where knowing enough HTML not to break the formatting wasn’t optional.
Louisiana State University National Center for Biomedical Research and Training
June 2009–December 2019
At NCBRT, Jennifer’s first assignment was to write the Technical Communications Editorial Style Guide from scratch, chapter by chapter under the direction of the division’s Assistant Manager for Technical Communications, who had been impressed by Jennifer’s aggressive approach to the editing test. The 158-page guide was released in January 2011. Meteoritics & Planetary Science had trained her in editing scientific content, and earlier work as a student had covered hazardous materials and chemical nomenclature. Over eleven years as an adjunct editor, she copyedited and proofread FEMA-funded classroom training materials for adult learners in emergency management and first responder fields, across more than a dozen courses covering food emergencies, agroterrorism, WMD incident management, biological events, hazardous environment investigations, and campus emergency response.
Post-Secondary Education
Dissertations for Doctorate of Education (Freelance)
October 2018–December 2019
Dissertation editing is a particular kind of diplomacy. The writer has spent years on the work, the stakes are high, and the editor is often the first outside professional eye the document has seen. Managing that relationship—explaining the workflow, coaching the candidate through track changes, flagging problems without undermining confidence—is as much a part of the job as the editing itself.
The Ed.D. candidates in the Executive Leadership program at the University of Holy Cross were working within a specific institutional framework: a 26-page APA guide that extended standard citation style to cover program-specific requirements combined with a Design Thinking methodology that shaped how candidates framed their research questions and structured their arguments. Editing these dissertations required enough familiarity with that framework to recognize when an argument wasn’t just unclear but structurally misaligned with the program’s expectations.
The work came through word-of-mouth referrals, beginning with a single contact and eventually reaching the point where the program itself was directing candidates to Jennifer directly. Seven or eight students were served over the engagement. The referral chain remained active for years after she stopped taking clients.