Pat McNees

Both a writer and an editor, Pat is especially useful for

* Writing, redrafting, or heavily editing your articles, papers, books, white papers, and other documents.

*Helping YOU figure out what you need to do on something you are writing yourself but having trouble with.

* Synthesizing or summarizing long, complex documents, presenting the key messages in a voice that will not put the average reader to sleep. Usually this involves coming up with a meaningful title, providing a 25-words-or-less summary line, and an executive summary four paragraphs to three pages long (depending on the audience and purpose). Pat has written several thousand (yes, thousand) executive summaries, for clients such as the Urban Institute, USAID, the World Bank, and various medical research organizations.

* Bringing dull or dullish material to life ——generally by injecting anecdotes, examples, narrative, and other devices that make the material more dynamic and interesting.

* Bringing a lighter touch to academic writing and translating into plain English writing dense with jargon.

* Synthesizing the main conclusions or arguments made in meetings and conferences. Telling a story or conveying messages in many voices but with a unified purpose.

* Building a narrative from a collection of oral histories or transcripts of interviews. This might be a life story, the history of an organization, or the story of an event.

* Bringing a uniform tone and voice to compilations and conference proceedings and bringing intelligence, structural clarity, and good taste to anthologies (Pat's anthologies stand the test of time.)

Here’s what one client (the author of a book on the defense industry) said: “As an editor, McNees has a keen eye for restructuring an early draft of a report and a gift for shortening and improving sentences, paragraphs, and papers without distorting their technical meaning. McNees has an ability to edit a manuscript at almost any level of detail the writer needs—as a broad-brush overview, at the paragraph-by-paragraph level, right down to line-by-line blue-pencil editing.”

Pat often combines editing with coaching. Experts for whom writing is difficult often ask for her because she helps them improve their sense of audience and their ability to write more cogently, concisely, clearly, and persuasively. Having a sense of humor helps ease the anxiety most people associate with writing projects.