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Wordsmith Associates is a full-service communication firm based in Geneva, Illinois, providing a variety of writing, editorial, design, and publication services to individuals, small businesses, corporations & nonprofit organizations.


Our primary goal at Wordsmith Associates is to enhance your communication – in the media you choose, in the words you use, and in the messages you convey. We work with you to express your perspectives in distinctive ways – in the form of books (and ebooks), web forums (blogs, articles, posts, websites, webvideos), speeches, reports & presentations, and other channel formats.


We are accomplished writers.

You name it – corporate presentations & reports, marketing plans, web content, training programs, personal legacies, or creative fiction – we cover the content-creation waterfront, providing original writing services that reinforce & extend your important communication and branding goals.

See our Services discussion for details on the full-range of our Wordsmith service offerings.


We are insightful editors.

Like smithies of yore, Wordsmith Associates takes a piece of work at any stage of completion and carefully finishes it to client specifications, with services that include proofreading, copyediting, fact checking, data proofing, preparation of abstracts, charts, indexes, and more. In our editing treatment, we deliver the work with style, accuracy, and distinction.

Contact Us to schedule a complimentary discussion of your project needs.


We are artful publishers.

Whether your project’s final deliverable is a book, a web article, a marketing piece, a legacy letter, or a strategic business plan, professional quality will always be distinguishing. In collaboration with Wordsmith Associates, your publication will be noted for engaging content, clever design, thoughtful construction, factual accuracy, error-free precision, and tasteful presentation.

Check out our Publications to see some illustrative examples of our work.



Featured Service

Legacy Letters Stand the Test of Time

Writing a Legacy Letter is an effective way to “tell your story” and make a lasting impact on others. Drawing on your life-learned thoughts and experience-earned insights, you can convey your sense of value and importance in a way that benefits others and helps solidify how you will be remembered. Wordsmith Associates can help. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION


Who’s Your Great-Grandfather … ?

If you were asked what your great-grandfather did for a living – the great-grandfather on your mother’s father’s branch – how would you answer?

You might be among the 17% or so who are in touch with their ancestry enough to hazard a good guess. More likely, you are one of the rest who have no clue what their great-grandfather did. In fact, you’re ahead of the pack if you even know his full name and where he lived.

Fast-forward now and reflect on your own life and the impact that your life might have on others. Do you want your great-grandchild to have a clue about you? to know who you were and what you did and maybe even something of what you cared about? Or are you content to have the stream of your life blend without identity into the amorphous river of time?

If you’re in the “have-a-clue” group, you’ve found yourself in a good spot, because one goal we have at Wordsmith Associates is to help you be remembered by others through legacy documents based on your life, expressed in your words and images. Click to learn more about:

  • LEGACY LETTERS
  • OTHER LEGACY DOCUMENTS

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

Billy Graham

Featured Client Success Story

American Woman’s “Journey” Chronicled in Book

Author Margaret Hastings in 1957 touring in Japan

When she was in her mid-70s, Margaret Jeanine Condit Hastings did an amazing job of writing the story of her life and, when she presented “My Life” to her children in thick 3-ring binders, she thought the work was done. Her son Steve, however, had other ideas. Steve envisioned the notebook as more like a bound book that would be easy to read and that would be sturdy enough to last well into the future.

To make this happen, Steve engaged Wordsmith Associates to publish the work and, within a few months, he presented back to his mother (on her birthday) a handsome hardback volume of My Life: An American’s Journey, complete with the main story, numerous captioned photographs, family tree information, and the text of all the Christmas letters that Margaret wrote over many years.

READ THE ENTIRE ENTRY ON MARGARET’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK

See Other Wordsmith Legacy Documents

SEEK TO FIND

AMAZON REVIEW OF ‘COMMON GOSPEL’

AMAZON REVIEW OF ‘COMMON GOSPEL’

First Amazon Review of 'The Common Gospel: The Ultimate Testament to Jesus the Messiah'

WORDSMITH ASSOCIATES NEWS

WRITINGS ON THE WALL

  • Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your action. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny. –Anonymous
  • How many verses have I thrown into the fire because the one peculiar word, the wanted most, was irrecoverably lost. –Walter Savage Landor, Verses Why Burnt
  • Man’s word is God in man. –Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Idylls of the King,” The Coming of Arthur
  • Prête-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot. Lend me your pen to write a word. –Au Clair de la Lune
  • The writer doesn’t want success ... The writer wants to leave a scratch on the wall of oblivion that someone a hundred or a thousand years later will see. Kilroy was here. –William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University
  • Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it. –Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
  • And many a word, at random spoken, may soothe a wound or heart that’s broken. –Sir Walter Scott, Lord of the Isles
  • Good words are worth much … and cost little. –George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum
  • Words are like leaves and, where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. –Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
  • Honeyed words like bees, gilded and sticky, with a little sting. –Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Pretty Words
  • Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact. It is silence which isolates. –Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
  • I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long Words Bother me. –Alan Alexander Milne, Willie-the-Pooh
  • Sweet religion makes a rhapsody of words. –Shakespeare, Hamlet
  • Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can’t write, can surely review. –James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics
  • So is a word better than a gift. –Apocrypha
  • How long a time lies in one little word! Such is the breath of kings. –Shakespeare, King Richard II
  • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. –Ernest Hemingway, Paris Review
  • Word is a shadow of deed. –Democritus
  • “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” –Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  • My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts –never to heaven go. –Shakespeare, Hamlet
  • To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality. –Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Traité Elémentaire de Chimie
  • The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sounds of silence. –Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence
  • The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work and that writing didn’t require any. –Russell Baker, Growing Up
  • Omit needless words. –William Strunk, Jr, The Elements of Style
  • It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some irradiating word. –Alexander Smith, “Dreamthorp,” On the Writing of Essays
  • In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. –Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
  • Life's like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. –Jim Henson, The Muppet Movie
  • Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, and universal darkness buries all. –Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
  • All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. –Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
  • Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled. –Horace, Epistles
  • A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. –John Steinbeck, “In Awe of Words”
  • Choice word and measured phrase… above the reach of ordinary men. –William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence
  • In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. –The Common Gospel, “Eternal Word”

CLICK HERE to see these writings on the wall in a larger size.

Printing in Perspective

Printing in Perspective
Your life is made up of two dates and a dash. Make the most of the dash.

Make the most of your life - your dash! - and share what you learn with others.

The kingdom of God does not come with observation ... for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. -Jesus the Messiah. The Common Gospel ("Final Journey)

WORDS-OF-THE-DAY

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AN AFFILIATED SERVICE

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