Every unclear sentence has a price.

Too many organizations are kind at the top of a letter and then inadvertently go cold in the middle of it. The greeting is friendly and mission-driven. The paragraph that delivers the news gets buried in policy language.

I have found that same pattern in hospital discharge packets, care-navigation waitlist notices, lenders' decline emails, and universities' financial aid notices. Almost nobody writes it that way on purpose.

It happens because responsibility is divided. Legal reviews the risk. The program team supplies the policy. Communications may never see the final operational language. No one person is accountable for the reader's experience of the whole message.

Your reader pays first, through confusion or missed action. Your organization pays next, through the call that follows or the form that never comes back.

How I know

I started as a reporter. Early stops at The Village Voice, The Nation, and Vanity Fair gave me an instinct for how language moves through the world. Since then I have worked inside public agencies, health systems, nonprofits, universities, and financial institutions, shaping what they say and how their language affects what people do.

My mother taught high school English in Baltimore, Maryland for thirty years, so I was raised by an editor with a loving yet sharp red pen who taught me the difference between a sentence that lands and one that does not.

I hold a BA in English Literature and Communications from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. I am currently based in Washington, DC.