Rachel E.

Announcing My New Searchable Portfolio

I am so excited to announce that I have revamped my portfolio, moving it from a static table to a dynamic, searchable database! You can access my new portfolio at https://bit.ly/relrom_portfolio, using the password “portfolio”. I’ve selected Airtable to host my portfolio. Airtable is an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled software as a service (SaaS) platform for organizing operationsContinueContinue reading “Announcing My New Searchable Portfolio”

What if I told you that you could save lots of time, money, and institutional memory with one simple action?

It’s true! And, I bet you’d be even more interested if I told you this step would require less than 30 seconds, right? It’s so simple. Yet every day I see colleagues doing exactly the opposite, costing precious time that we could use instead to go after a new funding stream, write a case study, or just leaveContinueContinue reading “What if I told you that you could save lots of time, money, and institutional memory with one simple action?”

Boomers vs. Zoomers, or How I Honed My WTF Face Upon Learning that Punctuation No Longer Matters

Q&A with a Millennial: How to punctuate so Zoomers will respect you So read the title of an article that figuratively slapped me across the face as I scrolled through my Google alerts for grammar and punctuation. (Yes, I’m that nerdy.) “I don’t feel a burning desire to be respected by Gen Z,” I thoughtContinueContinue reading “Boomers vs. Zoomers, or How I Honed My WTF Face Upon Learning that Punctuation No Longer Matters”

You can have the Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Pact, my employer, uses AP Style, which favors brevity over anything else. Actually, the entire field of international development is moving toward using AP, an initiative led by USAID. Putting aside my other feelings about AP style in our field (e.g., how are we supposed to cite our sources?!), there is one entry in the APContinueContinue reading “You can have the Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

How to Get More Content into Less Space

As an editor, the most frequent request I get from staff is to cut text or make text fit into a smaller space. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it’s more like my cat Teddy trying to force himself into this little paper bag. Let’s say you have two and a half pages of text thatContinueContinue reading “How to Get More Content into Less Space”