My career has exposed me to a number of mentors over the years.  But the bosses I am most grateful for are the bosses that forced me to write well.

Picky Editing

Both of the two bosses I’m thinking of, were incredibly particular about how I wrote and would send back drafts for revisions multiple time on what should have been simple, one-page memos.  And for larger documents, the editing process was more annoying than hemorrhoids.

But having such demanding bosses, required that my writing got better and better, and I soon learned to write in ways they found acceptable.

The most important concept I learned, was to eliminate unnecessary expressions.  Here is my list of expressions I try always to avoid:

“In order to” can almost always be replaced with “To”
“Due to the fact that” can usually be replaced with “Since”
“Please feel free to” can be replaced with “Please”
“At this point in time”  can be replaced with “Now”
“Despite the fact that” can usually be replace with “Although”

The first one, “in order to” was a particularly offensive phrase to one of my bosses…even when it was appropriate (and sometimes it is), it was still better to rephrase then entire sentence instead of using it, because it would ALWAYS be crossed out in red.

Current Knitting

More work on the Niece Blanket…

I’ve still got quite a bit of work to do on this one, so, of course I got distracted by the remnants of the Noro Hanabatake yarn (which I couldn’t possibly have thrown out!).  So I knitted up a mitered square swatch.

I’m a big fan of how Noro’s long color lengths work in mitered knitting…I ran out of the yarn with just a notch of knitting left to do, but I was able to get the sense that this would make an awesome fabric for a blanket or sweater.