Constance Hale has written two popular books on language, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style, which have gotten her dubbed “Marion the Librarian on a Harley, or E. B. White on acid.” Hale grew up in Hawaii, speaking grammatically correct English at home and Hawaiian creole (or “Pidgin”) with friends. She left the islands to get a bachelors degree in English Literature from Princeton and a masters from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley. She worked as a reporter and editor at the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner and started dabbling in the idiosyncracies of the mother tongue while copy chief at Wired magazine.

Her freelance journalism has appeared in newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the Miami Herald, as well as in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, Health, and Honolulu. Her travel essays have been published in numerous anthologies, including France, A Love Story (Seal Press) and Best Travel Writing 2006 (Travelers’ Tales).

Hale worked as a developmental editor at Wired Books and edits on a freelance basis for Harvard Business School Press (titles include Code Name Ginger, Many Unhappy Returns, and Getting Unstuck). Her private editing clients range from hedge fund managers writing to investors, to community leaders penning their memoirs, to bestselling authors like Po Bronson.

She is currently the director of the narrative program at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.