In addition to working with many individual authors, I’ve helped numerous organizations and businesses save time and communicate more clearly, including the following:
Avanti Properties Group
Brandywine Group Advisors
The Business Advisor magazine
Canadian Partnership Against Cancer
Dairy Farmers of Canada
Détente Financial Press
Access Private Wealth
Financial Planning Standards Council
Halmyre
Health Council of Canada
Inter-American Development Bank
Moya Financial
Ontario College of Family Physicians
Ovarian Cancer Canada
Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario
Wickett Measurement Systems
Sample Projects
In 
2018, I assisted first-time author and Ironman Triathlon champion Lisa Bentley with her inspirational self-published book An Unlikely Champion: Finding the Path to Fulfillment and Winning in Life. After seeing the first few edited pages, the author said “You are a magician. Thank you so much. You have really captured exactly what I want.”
The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer’s 2014 System Performance Report was a 174-page multi-author report featuring 95 graphs and tables and over 250 references. During editing it went through multiple iterations, gathering and merging input and approval from subject matter experts, committees and boards, and finally proofreading of the designed book.
From 2004 to 2017, I helped Dairy Farmers of Canada create eight nutrition and health education programs for students, including Power to Play (for kindergarten to grade 3), Power to Explore and Power4Bones (for grades 4–6), Power 2B Me and Titanium Chef (for grades 7 and 8) and My Meal Matrix (for grades 9–12). These programs include teacher guides and training webinars, quizzes and answer keys, student worksheets, backgrounders, learning activities, recipes, online content, rubrics and other resources. A key challenge was ensuring consistency across programs and in the many program pieces from copy editing to proofreading the often complex layouts.
My work on Managing Alone: Your Trusted Advisors’ Guide to Surviving the Death of Your Spouse, by Jennifer Black & Janet Baccarani (2013), entailed rewriting an early draft and notes and incorporating existing and new research with adapted real-life scenarios to create a practical, accessible, information-filled guide. The authors self-published the book to good reviews through their firm, DFS Private Wealth.
Through Outreach Communications, I copyedited the vast website for the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in 2011.
I’ve shepherded both books by Détente Financial Press’s principal, Thomas William Deans – Every Family’s Business: 12 Common Sense Questions to Protect Your Wealth (2008) and Willing Wisdom: 7 Questions Successful Families Ask (2013) – from first draft, through substantive editing and copy editing, to successful self-publication. Every Family’s Business has sold more than half a million copies and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 books business owners should read.
The Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario’s Atlas of Childhood Cancer in Ontario (2014) is a 64,000-word multi-author review of patterns and changes in childhood cancer statistics between 1985 and 2004. It was written for medical specialists, policy-makers, researchers and other health-care stakeholders. The editorial phase took over a year to complete and included checking over 75 charts and tables and more than 230 references.
Donna L. Dawson 