The Elements of Technical Writing

This book manages to pack a lot of material in quite a small bundle!Chapters 1-4 outline 50 umbrella rules to good (technical and other) writing. This address issues as wide-ranging as avoiding jargon, using proper hyphenation, and formatting complex mathematical formulas within your writing. It's not just a list -- it spans 4 chapters and includes both explanation and examples! The remaining 5 chapters are dedicated to specific topics such as writing manuals and proposals.Throughout, Blake and Bly manage to be both concise and incredibly useful. They provide examples for everything: writing numbers and symbols, revising wordy sentences, and the overuse of "-ize" (with lists of false words, though I disagree with several which have become standard in the language, business, or industry). Showing good writing vs. poor speeds effective learning!There are 2 appendices: A) "Writing in the Systems Environment", a short 2-page guide about how systems departments work and how this affects writing, and B) "A Brief Guide to Software for Writers." I found the appendices less useful than the text.Personally, I think "The Elements of Technical Writing" is top-notch. However, someone who needs in-depth tutoring in English grammar would not be served well by this book. Some people need a slower intoduction to everything. This book is *not* wordy, but it covers a lot of ground quickly.This warning should not be necessary for a college class, but unfortunately, people graduate from high school unable to write as even an eighth-grader should! Professors may consider using this book as a supplement to another -- not because it's inadequate, but because too many students have such low skills. Let the slower book baby them along, and match chapters from this book as reference material.For the rest of us, this book reminds us of grammar rules that have gotten fuzzy over time. This is staying on my shelf!

Not a great book for use as a text book, however very well written and also very good read. If you are just looking to learn and aren't looking for something to do homework with this is a great book.

I used this book years ago to hone my writing skills in my job. I passed it on to my daughter. I bought another copy to give to a coworker who wanted to improve his writing. It's laid out for easy reference. Best book I've had for technical writing.

More pages on how to properly write out NUMBERS (1 million instead of 1,000,000) than actual informative text.

Standard for anyone who needs to do any form of technical writing. The best thing is that you can refer to this book when people as why you wrote something a certain way. Everyone is a critic, so pointing to this book as a source of authority will help in business meetings

good

Great book. Easy to understand and follow. It is laid out in a user friendly manner. It has become my go-to-manual for all my technical writing needs. Even though some of the content is the basics, refreshing my skills has been an easy task with this book.

This book is a succinct description of necessary, day-to-day business writing. I keep several extra copies to give to friends.

Excellent as expected

Für den Anfänger im technical writing wohl sehr gut geeignet, jedoch wird für den Profi nicht viel Neues dabei sein...

The book is concise but completely useful information about technical writing. It also generalise some mistakes as well as words recommended using in technical writing.

共通ルールについての本なので、日本語で書かれているテクニカルライティングのルールについての本と、当然内容に大差はありませんが、興味深い記述がたくさんあり、読んでいて楽しいです。例えば、文の先頭の数字はスペルアウトしなければならない、というのはよく知られていることだと思いますが、ではそれが何故なのか、どういう感覚からなのか、と聞かれて答えられる人は少ないのではないでしょうか。使われている英語も平易なもので、スラスラ読めるので、おすすめです。

I purchased this book because my job requires me to generate technical reports and I am glad that I bought it. Before this book, I was using a very expensive technical writing manual that was too thick to carry around with me, but The Element of Technical Writing is quite different. The book is less than 200 pages long and it is very light. Don’t underestimate this book simply because of its minuscule size. The book is far more useful than some of the other expensive manuals on the market.