Carren Kaston has a doctorate in English literature and taught writing, literature, and film history at Washington and Lee University. Since leaving academe, she has worked in Washington, DC, as a consulting writer and editor for clients as diverse as the Library of Congress and the Department of Defense, as well as non-governmental entities such as Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore and an academic historian in Turkey. She brings intellectual creativity and rigor to her projects and tries to free government prose of jargon, indirection, and cloudy expression.
That has been a particular goal of hers in working on the Federal Aviation Administration’s annual Performance and Accountability Reports (PARs) for Congress and helping the Department of Defense with its “travel policy simplification” effort, directed at streamlining and making more user-friendly the department’s travel bible, the venerable 1600-page Joint Travel Regulations (JTR).