Jeri
Reilly is a writer and freelance editor. She is currently writing a
book--a manifesto for baby boomers--with co-author Eric Utne. She blogs
about word matters at www.jerireilly.com and can be followed on twitter
@jerireilly. She lives in Minneapolis and sometimes in Ireland.
Tell us about your background as an editor and writer.
I
fell into editing because I was a writer. For many years I worked for a
cultural organization where I wrote and edited all kinds of
communications for management.
One
day I told my boss I needed to get some credentials--so that when I
told this or that manager that they had to change a word or a sentence, I
would know which rule to cite. So they wouldn't take it personally. My
boss agreed, and so I flew to Chicago and took an intensive course
taught by the managing editor of the Chicago Manual of Style.
I
returned to work elated: I had my University of Chicago Publishing
School certificate, I knew my way around the latest edition of CMS, and I had a lovely box of (erasable) colored pencils for marking up pages.
Editing
has given me a lot of freedom. It made it possible for me to live in
Ireland after I left that full-time job. When I moved to a 200-year-old
stone cottage halfway up a mountain, I brought my American clients with
me, via dial-up internet. One of my writers, a memoirist, did not write
on the computer but was undaunted by the distance between us.