wordwatching

My years in grad school had to come to an end some time, so in 2006 I defended a dissertation on linguistic variation in rural Colorado English, which was the culmination of: 1) navigating the vast and sometimes treacherous terrain of the Centennial State to find and interview friendly, interesting people; 2) transcribing many, many hours of speech; and 3) analyzing a greater number of lexical, phonetic, and syntactic variables than I would care to count, or even think about, at this point. After graduation, I went to work in the private sector, where I conducted research for e-discovery (at ASE Edge, now Crivella West) and speech synthesis (at Perceptral); I also worked in the field of biomedical informatics at the College of Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I can't say that I was able to put much of what I had learned in or about Colorado to use in these situations, but I did get the opportunity to work with a great many clever, generous, and talented people, and attained many valuable skills that I still use in my work today.

I am now based in Lexington, Kentucky, where I recently took a position as Linguistic Atlas Inventory Specialist at the University of Kentucky. In addition, I continue to write and edit. On the writing side of things, Dr. Susan Tamasi and I are revising our textbook, Language and Linguistic Diversity in the United States: An Introduction, the first edition of which came out in late 2014. Over the last ten years, I've had several studies on Rocky Mountain English published in academic journals, as well as a chapter on the Western American English in the three-volume World Englishes (2013) and a chapter on the use of ain't in the Middle Rockies in a book called Ain'thology: The History and Life of a Taboo Word (2015). My current projects include the authoring of an e-book on the language of American popular music, which will be made available through this site, and a content-based workbook for learners of English as a second language.

In addition to writing, I am also the sole proprietor of Anvil Editing, which offers editing and proofreading services to writers at any stage in the publication process, as well as indexing to those who have completed their work. Among the company's valued clients are faculty and students at Stockholm University and at Karolinska Institutet, and at several other universities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia, as well as writers from outside academia working in such genres as (auto)biography and fiction. (At the bottom of this page, you will find links to some of the books that were edited, proofread, or indexed by Anvil Editing or that I worked on as a freelancer before registering the business.) If you are at a point where you could use another set of eyes on your work, contact me though my LinkedIn page here.

When I'm not working, I'm usually playing or listening to music, or watching movies.

Thanks for taking the time to read this page, and enjoy the site!

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Some titles that I've worked on, either as author or editor/indexer: