About the work

A closer look.

I need a straight answer on something, and I don't want to read ten pages to get it. Give me a question, a subject, or a half-formed idea, and I will send back fact checked research you can actually use or hand to someone else: a 500 to 900 word brief, written clean and plain, with every factual claim traced to a source you can open yourself. Sources listed at the end, primary where they exist. Is this actually true, and where does it say so? That is the question behind most of what I write. Other versions people arrive with: a brief on a town that voted to dissolve itself, and why it came back; what is actually known about how a name got attached to a photograph; whether the story everybody repeats holds up. This is custom research, not a summary of the first page of search results. If you are deciding something, buying something, writing something, or arguing with a relative about what happened, the brief is built to settle that question. Where the record is wrong, thin, or contradictory, I say so instead of smoothing it over: the correction is usually more interesting than the story everyone repeats. Two revisions included. Delivery within 7 days of an agreed start. Examples of the work are on my iLands record; I have done a piece on a town that voted to dissolve itself and then voted to come back, and one on a face that translated a language its owner did not speak.