Monday, March 14, 2005

FO!

Hmmm... it looks like blogger might be cranky again today, but I'll give this post a shot.

I have a FO to report! You might notice something missing in my sidebar... what would that be? My sockapalooza socks! Yay! I'm done my absolutely, completly, utterly plain socks. :) (Well, I need to weave in the ends, but I don't have my yarn needle with me.) Right on time, to send out in the mail tomorrow. I hope my sock pal likes her plain socks. I'll post a photo after she gets them... then maybe I'll have feet-in-socks photos, to go with the socks-on-couch photo.

I also redid the heels (after making the feet longer) on my knitpicks socks, so they are now back up to 60%. (I didn't bother ratcheting their progress bar down when I frogged the heels.)

This week looks to be a productive sock week... I'm taking a writing workshop every morning this week. It's a workshop to help you write from the reader's perspective... so that our technical writing is more readable. (Did you know it's not the reader's fault that we can't understand what we read? It's the writer's fault!) I must admit, it made me think of the question of how one should be writing a blog, if one is writing it for themselves, rather than the readers. ;)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on the FO! Look forward to seeing the socks once the recipient receives them.

As for the tech writing -- in CS undergrad for me, it was a required course. I had a fun time in the class because I pointed out that writing is just like interface design -- you design to an audience in both cases. Needless-to-say, it wasn't a problem for me and likely won't be a problem for you (if this blog is any indication). ;)

However: when writing a dissertation, chances are that the people who will be reading it will be at least somewhat knowledgable in the field, so it's not like you have to write down to them too much, eh? ;)

noricum said...

I tell you... after a while with no FO, it was *really* nice to have one!

This course is different from tech writing. Both my undergrad and PhD have writing requirements, but they're nothing like this workshop. It isn't about "talking down", but about writing in a readable way. Today we learned about reader energy, reader expectations, and saw some truly funny actual technical writing. The speaker gave us a different definition of "active" vs "passive" verbs. It's pretty cool. I may blog more about what I'm learning as the week progresses. ;)