Approach
The same three moves, on every project.
Complex content starts as a wall of legal, clinical, or technical language nobody wants to touch. My job is turning it into something a reader can act on, then holding that clarity through legal review, dev handoff, and every revision after. That process runs the same three moves, regardless of industry.
The Process
01
Audit
Read what's already live and flag what's unclear, redundant, or failing an accessibility check before writing anything new. At Agile Defense, this became a repeatable content audit process adopted across design teams, not a one-time cleanup.
02
Draft
Write the plain-language version first. Then fold back in the legal, brand, or technical requirements without losing the clarity. At Novant Health, that meant deciding what a patient needed to know first versus what could move lower on the page, for a redesign shipping 50-plus pages a week.
03
Ship
Test it with the people who'll actually push back, legal, dev, a real user, and hold the line through revisions. That discipline is what turned a 5,000-plus page university site with 20-plus navigation menus into one with 35% more engagement.
What Stays Constant
Clarity over cleverness
I'd rather ship one honest sentence than five that sound impressive. The job is translation, not simplification for its own sake: keep what's true, cut what's just there to sound careful.
Fluent in regulated content
Federal accessibility law, healthcare compliance, and legal review aren't obstacles to write around. I sit directly with those reviewers so requirements get resolved before launch, not after.
Repeatable over one-off
A style guide nobody opens isn't a system. The standards, audits, and intake frameworks I build get adopted and reused, because a fix that only works once isn't really a fix.
Held to the same bar as legal and dev
Content ships alongside code and gets the same scrutiny: reviewed, tested, revised. It's not a documentation afterthought bolted on at the end.