The Elements of Technical Writing

Review by Mark Jaworski (Vancouver InDesign User Group) Being a technical writer and translator of technical and legal documents into (and from) the Polish language, I read this book with great interest. I also gave it to my son who is graduating with Honors in English at the private High School St.George's in Vancouver. His teacher also found it interesting and useful. We were all trying to figure out who could benefit from this book and decided that anybody from High School and College students to professional writers working on computer manuals or any other subject. I was specially impressed with Chapter 7 WRITE ETHICALLY. This could apply to people writing school assignments, preachers as well as writers of a State of the Union Address. That should be a compulsory reading to all writing more than signatures. Considering cultural differences is mentioned, but I would add that if a technical manual is going to be localized into various languages, an original may have to be modified to match not only contents but also a syntax. In English questioner often makes a statement and asks "Isn't that true?" In Polish every question must start from a proper word like What? Where? How much? And so on. I know from personal experience that many computer programmers lack social skills and for this very reason they went into working with things, rather than dealing with people. They feel much more comfortable thinking and speaking in binary C+ rather than in any human language. I would like to see in a future editions of this book, some advice to the technical writers on a subject of art of extracting information from not very talkative programmers or designers. I use questions like: Could it do (blank)? If the answer is YES! I say why didn't you say so in a your product specifications? It sometimes takes days or even weeks to write good manual for the new or improved product, which is worth reading, according to the old adage: When everything else fails -- read the manual! I am sure that this book will make many manuals to be more useful. 4 pages of CONTENTS, 4 pages of PREFACE and 6 pages of INDEX (in a fine print), for about 150 pages booklet, are excellent examples of work done well, to the benefit of the reader, who is saving time. It's the Authors -- Thomas E. Pearsall and Kelli Cargile Cook, who took lots of time to make it easy to read and remember.