Language is central to my worldview.

My first conscious language experience was as a child discovering the proto-Indo-European language glossary at the back a very large and heavy Merriam-Webster dictionary. The neurons in my brain were firing on all cylinders while pouring over those pages. A few years after that I began my yearly tradition of reading Lord of the Rings, eating up everything about Tolkien’s conlangs! In high school I spoke French with such ease my French teacher and Haitian classmates thought I spoke French at home ( I didn’t; my widowed, Irish mother only knew English and Irish). I also began writing (poems, essays, short stories) in high school.

In College I picked up Spanish in my junior year and thanks to all my Latin American friends at Hunter College, I became borderline fluent. My Spanish creative writing and literature professor was so impressed by my mastery of grammar and vocabulary that he referred to me as Don Tomás. He read one of my short stories at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. I had also taken a pedagogical class that required me to observe and write about a high school class on a weekly basis. The professor grading my reports said she always enjoyed reading my reports. I also wrote for the Baruch evening newspaper, The Reporter.

I graduated with a double concentration in French & Spanish language and literature and a double minor in journalism (my original major) and education.

In my sophomore year in college I spent a year in France. In my last year in college I spent a summer in Spain. and in between I spent a summer in Jonquière, Québec. Subsequently, I got a master’s degree in translation from Spanish and French to English.

I’ve worked professionally as a translator for a while before I took a 20 year detour into software development, just another set of languages. More recently, since January 2023 I have been tutoring French, Spanish and English on line and in person.

I have alway been detailed-oriented. Grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling and word choice have been ideas and phenomena that I would ponder and are often the subject of discussion I have with my wife. It only seems a natural fit for me to engage in proofreading and copy editing. Consequently, I proudly earned a certificate in proofreading and copy editing from the Edit Republic before launching Sherlock Editorial.