Melissa Walsh
WRITER | EDITOR | STRATEGIST
Publishing Services
Melissa Walsh creates and enhances content with human intelligence.
Writing
Constructing and shaping the message for the audience.
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News and feature writing
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Reference and education writing
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Profile writing
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Copywriting
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Proposal writing
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Ghostwriting
Editing
Tackling mistakes and carrying the message to goal.
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Copyediting
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Fact-checking
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Proofreading
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Desktop publishing
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Translation into English from French and German
Strategy
Structuring and enhancing content for smart messaging.
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DITA XML authoring
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Taxonomy and semantic tagging
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Information architecture
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Content modeling
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Content auditing
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Unified content operations
The Low Down
Melissa provides editorial and strategy services per client service agreements. Unless contracted as work-for-hire, Melissa holds copyright to her work. Contact Melissa for licensing terms.
The Down Low
Melissa honors the privacy of her clients and protects any confidential information and proprietary content made available to her during the course of fulfilling client services. Contact Melissa for a quote.
About AI
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Melissa applies more than 35 years of experience to create and refine content. She does not use "artificial" tools.
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When doing research online, Melissa verifies generative-search summaries with primary sources.
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Melissa's expertise in XML authoring and content modeling enables semantically rich content that LLMs love.
TOOLS
About Melissa
A Working-Class Wordsmith
Over her long career, Melissa Walsh has cultivated a valuable blend of skills in print and digital publishing. In her personal and professional life, she describes herself as shaped by the working class, enlightened by the liberal arts, conditioned by struggle, and blessed with the vigorous crazy that goes with having raised four sons. She initiates discovery and pursues objectives from a wealth of life and work experience.
Born in Detroit, Melissa was raised in a UAW family. She became the first in her family to earn a college degree, a recipient of a Hope College grant in the 1980s for first-generation college students. Here, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies. Then, while working in the International Services Office and English Language Institute at Wayne State University, she pursued a master's degree in linguistics. During most of the 1990s, Melissa worked as a project editor for reference and education print and CD-ROM products, cultivating an expertise in developing content within the framework of SGML and XML data models.
With four young sons to provide for in the early 2000s, Melissa pivoted her career from publishing to the automotive and defense industries, where she was able to earn a higher income. She returned to the classroom over the course of three years for training in automotive technology/service engineering, evolving into a publishing specialist who could also read a schematic and turn a wrench.
From 2020 to 2025, Melissa served as a senior content strategist with MRM of McCann Worldgroup, supporting the customer experience (CX) interface for General Motors digital self-service help and learning content. She designed and activated strategies to ensure that the answers GM customers were looking for were easily findable and useful. To close content gaps and improve existing content, she conducted content audits and usability testing. Melissa also provided valuable thought-leadership and training to colleagues, clients, and agency partners in how to apply the DITA XML data model to build "intelligent" content, in other words content enriched with metadata and semantic value.
Satisfying her love of research and writing, Melissa also functioned as a freelance journalist throughout her career, contributing numerous articles to local and regional newspapers and magazines. In 2005, she authored The Rookie Hockey Mom, revised in 2012. She is actively pursuing the publication of other completed book-length manuscripts.
CLIENTS/EMPLOYERS
Storytelling
Little-Known Lives in Story
Writer Melissa Walsh's passion is storytelling grounded in historical and social truth. She processes into story characters and events she encounters from living, learning, and imagining, seeking to deliver Truth as tale in fiction and as expression in essay. Her style prompts the reader to explore and process alternate perspectives.
With the faith that resplendent narrative exists everywhere, Melissa tracks revelations resting quietly in overlooked places and sets them into compelling story, showcasing little-known people and circumstances, as captured in her discovery, filtered by her understanding, and enlivened with her imagination.
In addition to fulfilling project assignments as an independent publishing professional, Melissa finds time to write stories most early mornings, resulting in numerous published articles and essays and several completed, unpublished works she's actively pitching.
