"You're good with words..."
I know we're all blind to our own flaws, and strengths, all to varying degrees, but there's one that's puzzling me.
A while back, I was talking to my Team Lead in work and he said that he had to review our test plan, "and I'm probably going to rope you in to do something that I know you're good at: writing." I was actually surprised when he said it, because I don't consider myself to be that good at it; especially for technical documents. For the final year project, I agonised at the fact that I couldn't actually piece something together that didn't sound humdrum and repetitive. I was stuck with using the same clumsy language while I tried to describe interactions of agents, because there were only a few phrases that could be considered accurate, so it was generally quite repetitive and tired.
I thought no more of it. I know I can correct his grammar and spelling (when he's writing something official), so I'm ok at the technical aspect of it, but actually putting words to something as constrained as the test plan? No.
Then, on Saturday, I was in Fibbers and describing the game Articulate - a game where you're given a word and you have to come up with a way to describe it for someone without using the word in question - and one girl said that I'd be good at it because of my English. To me, the trick to that game is knowing how your teammates think, rather than your grasp of the language, but my apparent grasp of the language seems to be a recurring theme at the moment.
I know I'm in Toastmasters, and that forces me to think about how I construct sentences, but I honestly don't believe it's anything special compared to the others who are saying it.
Go figure.
A while back, I was talking to my Team Lead in work and he said that he had to review our test plan, "and I'm probably going to rope you in to do something that I know you're good at: writing." I was actually surprised when he said it, because I don't consider myself to be that good at it; especially for technical documents. For the final year project, I agonised at the fact that I couldn't actually piece something together that didn't sound humdrum and repetitive. I was stuck with using the same clumsy language while I tried to describe interactions of agents, because there were only a few phrases that could be considered accurate, so it was generally quite repetitive and tired.
I thought no more of it. I know I can correct his grammar and spelling (when he's writing something official), so I'm ok at the technical aspect of it, but actually putting words to something as constrained as the test plan? No.
Then, on Saturday, I was in Fibbers and describing the game Articulate - a game where you're given a word and you have to come up with a way to describe it for someone without using the word in question - and one girl said that I'd be good at it because of my English. To me, the trick to that game is knowing how your teammates think, rather than your grasp of the language, but my apparent grasp of the language seems to be a recurring theme at the moment.
I know I'm in Toastmasters, and that forces me to think about how I construct sentences, but I honestly don't believe it's anything special compared to the others who are saying it.
Go figure.