Michelle Burleson / Writer and ghostwriter / Finance, Government, Health, IT

Hard subjects.
Your voice.
Problem solved.

When the subject is hard, the deadline is real, and your name goes on it, I'm who you call.

Let's talk See the work
What you get
  • Complete drafts. Not outlines for you to finish.
  • Your voice. I study it, match it, and keep it consistent.
  • Sourced claims. You can trace every number.
  • Fewer revision rounds. Which is where budgets die.
What I fix

You already know what this feels like.

Readers give you a few seconds, so every word has to punch above its weight. Landing a hard subject that fast takes more than a generalist with a thesaurus.

The problem
What I do about it
The material is complicated and every draft comes back hedged into mush.
I learn the material before I write a word. Credit default swaps one year, a five billion dollar federal IT vehicle the next, female endocrinology after that. The vocabulary changes. The homework doesn't.
Your byline is sitting on sentences you'd never write. The people who know you can tell.
I read how you argue when you're not being careful, then write you at your sharpest.
You're on round six. The invoice climbs, the piece devolves, and nobody says why.
You get a finished draft, not a scaffold. Two rounds is normal. Six usually means somebody skipped the first conversation.
There's a number in the third paragraph and nobody remembers where it came from.
Every claim traceable to a source, footnoted to your house standard when the work calls for it.
It reads like a machine wrote it. A machine wrote it.
I keep a running list of machine tells and scrub against it before you see page one.
What I can do for you

What people hire me for.

Ghostwriting in your voice

Op-eds, columns, executive bylines, thought leadership. Your name goes on it. Mine doesn't.

Financial and market commentary

Analysis I build on current data and source line by line. I read the release, not the summary of the release.

High-stakes and crisis communication

When the news is bad and the lawyers are in the room. I did this inside Fannie Mae in 2008 and the instincts stuck.

Enterprise IT, federal, and healthcare

Capability briefs and technical collateral for buyers who read forty of these a week and trust none of them.

Direct response for health and wellness

Email sequences and long-form sales copy for strength and nutrition, where I'm the expert as well as the writer.

Editorial systems and style guides

Voice guides, house style, and review workflows that stop the same argument from happening on every draft.

The question everyone is too polite to ask

No, AI doesn't do my writing. It does my grunt work.

The words are mine. They have to be, because sounding human is the entire product. But refusing to touch the tools would be its own kind of malpractice, so I've spent real time learning where they help and where they wreck things.

  • Research and pressure-testingFaster background, and an argument I've already attacked from every angle before it reaches you.
  • Editorial infrastructureVoice guides, style systems, and review workflows. I've built these end to end, brand voice through review checklist.
  • Prototypes and visualsWorking apps, graphics, and design assets when a page needs to show something instead of describing it.
  • Fewer rounds, lower overheadThe savings aren't in drafting. They're in the four revision cycles that never have to happen.
What I scrub from every draft
A working list I keep current. If you've read enough machine copy, you already flinch at these.
  • Em dashes, everywhere, always
  • "Make no mistake"
  • "It's not just X, it's Y"
  • Three-part lists in matched rhythm
  • A tidy aphorism ending every paragraph
  • Colon, then the elaboration. Again.

I know machine writing when I hear it. That's how I keep it out of mine.

Selected work

Some of it has my name on it.

Financial & market
Enterprise & federal
Health & direct response
Clients

Who's trusted me with it.

About

I learned this job in the worst possible week.

In September 2008 I was writing crisis communications inside Fannie Mae when the federal government took control of the company.

I learned credit default swaps and subprime mechanics the way you learn anything that sticks: under pressure, with smart colleagues, needing to explain it to someone by Friday. The mechanics of a swap don't matter to a family reading a foreclosure notice. What matters is whether someone can draw the line from one to the other in language that doesn't require a finance degree.

That was the job then and it's the job now. I have done it for a federal mortgage giant, a bank, two enterprise technology companies, a hospital system, and a long list of people whose names are on the work instead of mine.

The Inova work won a Standard of Excellence Web Award, which was nice. The better measure is that clients call back.

B.A. in English with honors, George Mason University. I grew up in Korea and read the language.

Tell me what you're working on.

What it is, who reads it, and when you need it. That's enough to start.

hi@michelleburleson.com