Wednesday, March 30, 2005

I thought of a blessing today that I have been remiss in being thankful for…my boss.

She has been incredibly supportive, and I find it a privilege to work with her because she is grace and maturity and professionalism personified.

But, what I thought of today was not these qualities. What I thought of was the fact that she is a talented writer. She wrote the descriptions of the core values at our work. The language is simply beautiful. Succinct and descriptive and powerful all at once. Some month ago, I was surprised to learn that she wrote them. But I shouldn’t have been.

She is a great editor. She can take my writing and polish it to a beautiful shine. A word here, a phrase there. And, of course, her blatant deletions. I moan and groan when she deletes whole sentences, or even worse whole paragraph. And I near keel over when she takes nearly every bit of “passionate” description (non-business metaphors) and forces me to focus. But her efforts always makes my writing better.

We do argue a bit. For example, she is against the use of “both” when I fundamentally believe that you need to lead the average reader these days…you need to set them up for compound ideas when those ideas are long and full of adjectives, adverbs, or modifying phrases. The word “both” serves as a trigger to the reader to remind them to look for two things in the sentence, not one. But alas nearly every “both” has been stricken from my writing.

I am working on web site text and marketing collateral text and letters and ads and handbooks and proposals and… I enjoy writing. I revel in this aspect of my work.

And I am thankful that I have someone serving as an editor who is clearly talented and makes every word I write better.

What writer could want more?

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