The Writing System for Engineers and Scientists

Without doubt, the most comprehensive, most easily understood book on business writing I've ever read. (Actually, it's great for all kinds of writing.) I'm thrilled to see it back on the market. I want to give it as a gift to all who ask me for a recommendation.

Edmond H. Weiss' The Writing System for Engineers and Scientists has helped my writing ability more than all my English courses in high school and college combined!! This book is so practical. I read it a few years after I got my first job out of engineering school. Before I read this book, I was fair (at best) at writing. I still may not be a fantastic writer, but I'm TEN times better than I was BEFORE reading it. One of the best things it taught me was to write down, in a single sentence, exactly what I want the reader to know, believe or do as a result of reading my letter/report/memo/etc because it serves as a reference point from which to organize and plan my writing and eliminates that "floundering around" trying to figure out where to start and which way to go, which plagued me before reading the book. (I'm still working on reducing my sentence length.) To reiterate: This book has done more to improve my writing than all my English courses in high school and college comibined -- which says a lot about those courses and their textbooks. I wish I had had this book back in 9th grade. You MUST get this book if you have a lot of difficulty writing, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to write better, faster, and more efficiently! It's hard to get me to recommend ANY book because I'm so critical and cynical. But I not only recommend this book, I recommend it VERY HIGHLY to EVERYONE who writes (which is almost all of us)! The world would be a lot better place if everyone read this book and put it into practice. Why? Because everything would be much easier to read, and less would be written in the first place. And there's no place that needs clearer and more concise writing than the US Government, which is where I work. Many thanks to you Dr. Weiss.