Geta Carlson - Home

Geta Carlson

Welcome!

I’ve been an independent writer and editor in the Bay Area for 30 years. I specialize in making technical information clear and accessible for professional audiences and newcomers, a process that starts with digging deep to understand the how and why myself.

I also write and edit marketing and sales materials, making them brief and appealing, and tuning for brand voice.

Managers and colleagues know me as a team player — someone who works well with product managers, engineers, content experts, designers, production staff, and other writers and editors.

Services

Technical writing: Information design, developer suites (SDK and API reference tools), system administration guides, white papers, proposals, solution overviews, user guides (including visually oriented task reference tools and quick lookup tools), and user/operator training.

Editing: Developmental editing and copy editing, with experience working in a range of product and service types. Emphasis on strong structure and the natural unfolding of ideas, and on accuracy, brevity, and consistency. I set and document standards through style sheets or wikis.

Marketing communications: Brochures, white papers, data sheets, solution overviews, catalogs, newsletters, emails. Technical and biomedical marketing, and B2B and consumer collateral of all kinds.

Project management: Plan, track, and control projects with multiple contributors and many moving parts to get results.

Contact

Email: geta.carlson@gmail.com
Phone: 510.548.2626

Resume in Word
Resume in PDF

Geta Carlson

Geta embodies a rare skill set: a combination of intelligence, analytical ability, curiosity, painstaking attention to detail, clear communication (written and verbal), and a gift for concision. As a bonus, Geta also offers decades of experience in many kinds of technical writing. She is reliable, gracious, adaptable, funny, and intellectually alive.

Bill Freais, Partner, Tenfold Information Design
Geta is a master of structured content — readers internalize a map of the information without even thinking about it … [As a writer], she brings the reader/end user into the center of the picture. As an editor, she brings a lot of intensity to her work, but not much ego, and I love that combination.

John Taylor, senior writer and project manager, Adobe, HP, and many others
Ms. Carlson has been superb in directing our heterogeneous group of authors toward a highly successful outcome. She established great rapport with our contributing doctors, and her organizational and editorial skills quickly advanced this project to the next level.

Robert G. Fante, MD, FACS: Medical Co-Director of new training and CME site for ocular plastic surgeons
The edits from Geta look great — thank goodness we have people with this talent at Cisco!

Don Proctor, Senior Vice President, Cisco
Geta’s great to work with, quickly gets inside complex applications to gain an accurate understanding of difficult designs and functionality, and writes exceptionally well about them.

Jim McNamara, image recognition architect for FIS banking system
Geta did an extremely professional job for our clients, really wonderful. What stands out is her ability to comprehend the whole project, to see it in its final form, and understand it from the point of view of both the project’s participants and its audience.

Randall Goodall, Seventeenth Street Studios (Graphics, Marketing, Publishing)