Jill E. Mazzetta is a writer, editor, and researcher with over fifteen years of experience. She drafts and edits industry-leading and award-winning content that helps subject matter experts of all kinds further their professional goals and reach new audiences.
From a young age, she knew she wanted to pursue a career in publishing. She graduated summa cum laude from Emerson College in her native Boston, Massachusetts, where her coursework allowed her to gain hands-on experience in the local publishing industry as part of completing her degree. She minored in science communications.
Soon after graduating, she began working as a copy editor and fact-checker for the consumer publishing division of Harvard Medical School. There, she worked alongside Harvard doctors and researchers, helping them write and review news articles that shared their expertise with general audiences. She quickly gained a reputation for being able to describe complex medical and scientific topics in language accessible to non-experts, and for her numerous “good catches” of even the subtlest grammatical and factual inconsistencies. She also worked alongside her colleagues to digitize the division’s content library and expand their online presence, eventually winning Healthline’s Best Heart Disease Blog Award in 2015.
During her time in the Boston publishing scene, she also worked for the English language arts division of Amplify Education, a pioneer in teaching and assessing literacy in American schools, where she edited and proofread one of the United States’s first tablet-based suites of classroom learning materials.
Throughout these first few years of her career, her experience working alongside educators and medical experts drew her to think deeply about the connections between the science of language and the craft of editing. She eventually decided that she wanted to study linguistics, with the goal of advancing her expertise as an editor.
In 2016, she moved to Germany and began pursuing a master’s degree in English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg. While there, she also served as the editor for many of the professors and doctoral candidates in the linguistics department. Drawing on her in-house experience from her years in Boston, she copyedited and proofread journal articles, monographs, and dissertations, and also acted as a liaison between the experts and the journals and publishing houses their work was destined for. While in Regensburg, she also gained a great deal of experience in working with authors who are not native speakers of English, along with first-time authors of academic texts.
Jill attained her master’s degree in 2019. Her thesis was on the contemporary everyday usage of who versus whom and the resulting linguistic implications; it explored the boundaries between what is traditionally seen as an editor’s remit to “correct” language, the realities of modern communication, and the role of contemporary editors in facilitating communication rather than simply classifying it as “right” or “wrong.”
Upon finishing her master’s degree, she moved to Rome, Italy, and officially hung out her shingle as a full-time freelancer. She now writes and edits for authors all over the world. Her clients range from intergovernmental organizations headquartered in the city, to entrepreneurs building an online presence, to professors and postdocs, and everyone in between. She works across the spectrum of nonfiction content, and is just as comfortable working on a dissertation as she is on website copy.
When she’s not working with clients, you can often find her in the dance studio. She has been in dance lessons practically since she could walk, and her “career” in dance performance is longer than her career in publishing. In recent years, she has begun to focus more on teaching than on performing; in particular, she teaches dance for a variety of color guard teams on both sides of the Atlantic, for both their outdoor fall and indoor winter seasons.
Her other hobbies include traveling to new places (she wants to see the entire world) and staying fit. She has a soft spot for the Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and is active in digital archaeology projects and other efforts to archive and preserve lost and endangered media.
A feminist and a staunch ally of the LGBTQ+ community, she has supported progressive causes through activism and local engagement for decades.