EditCraft is one person, Eric Engles, who wears many hats in working to deliver quality editorial services to his clients.

Drawing from more than 19 years of experience in the editing business, Eric uses the tools of his craft to optimize the impact and clarity of communication in any form: text, graphics, art, or data. He specializes in developmental editing--working with authors to organize ideas, shape structure, and bring out intended messages. When necessary, he can rewrite material while preserving the original style and core ideas. He has managed editorial projects and has experience coaching, training, and supervising the work of writers. Eric is a longstanding member of the Bay Area Editors' Forum.

Trained in the early days of the prestigious Science Writing Program at UC Santa Cruz, Eric is at home writing about scientific and technical topics for general audiences. But he is equally comfortable with other genres, including general nonfiction, journalism, travel writing, fiction, and poetry. He has written software user guides, online help systems, teacher's guides, school curricula, articles for academic journals, natural resource baseline surveys, and "brain teasers" for Houghton Mifflin's Math Center website, and he has published other material in a wide variety of venues, from poetry journals to a magazine for science teachers. Eric is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.

Eric enjoys the challenge of organizing information, whether in paragraphs, books, or Websites. Through intelligent page layout, integration of words and images, careful attention to conceptual clarity, and circumspect structural design, he works to give the reader or viewer the power to make sense of published material.

Eric has training and experience in environmental education, and worked for many years as a peer writing tutor. He has taught in university classrooms as both an instructor and teaching assistant. Most recently (2009 and 2014) he was the co-instructor of the Natural History Field Quarter at UC Santa Cruz, a 15-unit field course that takes students all over the state of California to learn about plants, birds, mammals, geology, ecology, and conservation policy. He enjoys using his intuitive sense of the learner's experience to make learning fun and empowering. Many of Eric's clients are educational publishers and educational institutions who value his pedagogical skills. He has done much work in educational technology and "e-learning," and his skills in this area were recognized in his being selected in three consecutive years as a finalist judge for National Semiconductor's Internet Innovator Award, given to teachers in California, Maine, and Texas who use the internet effectively in their teaching.

An artist at heart, Eric creates drawings, charts, and graphs to illustrate material and convey ideas not easily expressed in words alone. He also designs attractive page layouts for print materials, and elegantly functional Web pages. He can produce final art--as he has done for all the illustrations in a college textbook--or craft sample art that allows the artist, illustrator, or designer to clearly see what is required.

Well versed in HTML markup, CSS, and Javascript, Eric combines knowledge of the technical side of web design with a good design sense and ability to organize information clearly. He handled the content revision and page re-design of an instructional Website for the University of California, and has built several sites from the ground up, including this one. One volunteer effort is a site for the Wolf Creek Community Alliance, a grass-roots nonprofit based in Grass Valley, CA.

While earning his bachelor's degrees in biology and environmental studies, Eric studied marine biology, invertebrate taxonomy, natural history, evolution, ecology, and botany, as well as statistics, physics, chemistry, and calculus. To complete his undergraduate work, he carried out a survey of the flora and vegetation of an area in Big Sur that was subsequently published. With this natural science background, Eric is familiar with the process of scientific research in a variety of fields, and continues a pursuit of science as an amateur botanist and natural historian.

Eric holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied critical theory, cultural studies, the sociology of science, feminist theory, and history and culture. He is well versed in both the quantitative and qualitative methods of the social sciences, and is at least moderately familiar with most of the social science disciplines. This background allows Eric to appreciate the issues and perspectives of social science research and to serve in the role of constructive peer critic.