Welcome to my portfolio. I am a technical editor with more than a decade of experience editing complex, expert-written documents for clarity, structure, and argument—including federal technical reports, mathematics curricula, and cloud computing white papers.
The samples below are organized around three capabilities: editing expert-written technical content for a specific audience, developing and maintaining editorial standards, and structuring complex multi-author technical documents for clarity and internal consistency.
Each section includes a brief note on context and what the sample demonstrates. Where possible, files with tracked changes are included so the nature and extent of the editing is visible.
Section 1: Editing Technical Content for Expert Audiences
The following samples are from my work copyediting technical blog posts for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog, under contract with Steyer Content (2021–2022) and Resources Online (2019). The authors are engineers, data scientists, and cloud architects writing for other practitioners. My role was to make their arguments clearer and more readable without softening the technical content, misrepresenting their claims, or inserting voice that was not theirs.
The editing challenge in each case was helping a technical author say precisely what they meant, acknowledge the scope and limits of their claims honestly, and present their reasoning in a sequence that a knowledgeable but non-specialist reader could follow.
Each entry includes an edited version with tracked changes. The live published version links to the final accepted text.
1a. An AI-Driven Dashboard for Life Sciences Laboratories
Context: AWS Life Sciences Blog, Steyer Content, 2022
Published: aws.amazon.com → Life Sciences Blog
This post describes an AI-driven data visualization system built for laboratory environments, combining AWS services with machine learning pipelines. It demonstrates my comfort editing AI/ML subject matter and producing clear prose from technical authors whose primary expertise is not writing.
File: Edited (tracked changes) ↓
1b. Transforming Site Monitoring in Clinical Trials
Context: AWS Healthcare & Life Sciences Blog, Steyer Content, 2022
Published: aws.amazon.com → Life Sciences Blog
This post makes a technical argument for an AWS-based approach to remote clinical trial monitoring. The editing challenge was helping the author present a clear, evidence-grounded case for their approach while acknowledging its scope and limitations honestly—a challenge familiar to anyone editing safety or evaluation documentation.
File: Edited (tracked changes) ↓
1c. Building STIG-Compliant Amazon Machine Images for EKS
Context: AWS Containers Blog, Steyer Content, 2022
Published: aws.amazon.com → Containers Blog
A technically dense post on security hardening for Kubernetes clusters. This sample demonstrates that I can work fluently with highly specialized infrastructure content, preserving precision while improving structure and readability for a knowledgeable audience. The editing task was largely structural: reorganizing the argument so that the author’s reasoning was visible, not just their conclusions.
File: Edited (tracked changes) ↓
1d. Using AWS DataSync to Move Data from Hadoop to Amazon S3
Context: AWS Storage Blog, Steyer Content, 2022
Published: aws.amazon.com → Storage Blog
A data engineering post aimed at practitioners migrating large-scale data infrastructure, this sample shows range across the data domain and illustrates my ability to edit content I did not fully understand at first read—asking the right questions, checking terminology against source documentation, and producing prose that is accurate because I did not guess.
File: Edited (tracked changes) ↓
Section 2: Developing Editorial Standards
The two guides in this section were each built from scratch for a specific organization and extended The Chicago Manual of Style to cover domain-specific usage that the base style could not anticipate. They are different instruments: one is a comprehensive department-wide reference compiled over years of accumulated editorial practice; the other is a targeted, project-specific guide written to govern a single large curriculum initiative. Together they show that the same methodological approach—audit existing inconsistencies, make explicit the judgment calls, write guidance non-editors can actually apply—scales across very different domains and purposes.
2a. NCBRT Technical Communications Editorial Style Guide (v1.1)
Context: National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, Louisiana State University, 2010
This 158-page guide was written and compiled for the Technical Communications team at NCBRT, where I served as Adjunct Editor for nearly eleven years. It covers abbreviations, capitalization, citations, grammar, numbers, punctuation, source formatting, and usage specific to emergency management and federal training contexts.
Building it required auditing inconsistencies across years of existing course materials, making judgment calls about contested usage, and writing guidance clearly enough that non-editor subject-matter experts could apply it independently. This is the kind of work Anthropic describes as developing templates, style guidance, and contributor guides so that each production cycle starts from a stronger baseline.
File: Style Guide PDF ↓
2b. Great Minds Editorial Style Guidelines
Section 3: Structural Editing of Complex Technical Documents
The two samples in this section are federal or federally regulated documents produced through IEM, where I have served as a technical editor since 2020 and an embedded FEMA contractor from 2021 to 2023. Each involves multi-author source material that must resolve into a single internally consistent document.
3a. FEMA Region 10 Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake and Tsunami Plan (January 2023)
Context: IEM, FEMA contractor, 2023
Published: Washington State Military Department → Website
This regional emergency operations plan was produced for FEMA Region 10 in preparation for a Cascadia Subduction Zone seismic event—one of the highest-consequence natural disaster scenarios in North America. The document is multi-agency, multi-author, and structured to be used operationally under crisis conditions, where clarity and precision are not abstract virtues but practical requirements.
The editing challenges were structural as much as stylistic: ensuring consistent terminology across authors who wrote independently, maintaining logical flow across sections with different owners, verifying that cross-references and role assignments were internally coherent, and catching claims that subtly contradicted each other across sections. The document had to read as one coherent plan, not a collection of contributions.
3b. Orange County, New York Multi-Jurisdictional Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan (2025)
Context: IEM Technical Communications Team, contractor to Orange County, NY, 2025
Published: townofnewburghny.gov/ → Hazard Mitigation Plan (PDF)
At 2,557 pages covering more than twenty participating jurisdictions, this plan represents the largest class of document in my regular editorial practice. Hazard mitigation plans of this scale are produced by assembling dozens of individually authored Word files—written by planners, subject-matter experts, and jurisdiction representatives across the county—into a single unified document, which is then edited for consistency, coherence, and compliance with FEMA formatting and content standards before submission.
The editorial process is genuinely collaborative: the IEM Technical Communications Team contributes at multiple stages, with different editors taking ownership of different sections and phases. On this project, an outside editing firm was also engaged to manage volume; IEM editors, including me, reviewed and reconciled their work alongside our own. Final quality review of the combined document—checking for terminology drift, broken cross-references, inconsistent role assignments, and formatting compliance—requires one editor to hold the whole in view at once.
The document goes through multiple submission cycles: to the client for review, back to IEM for revisions, to the state for approval, back again, and ultimately to FEMA. FEMA approval is required for jurisdictions to remain eligible for federal hazard mitigation planning grants—which means the accuracy and internal consistency of the document is not an editorial nicety but a condition of federal funding.
May 2026
Jennifer Merchán | Editor 