31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This book is strictly about improving grammar within writing, October 6, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: 100 Writing Remedies: Practical Exercises for Technical Writing (Paperback)
This book is strictly about improving grammar within technical writing. This book does not contain interesting writing excersies (other than grammar)to use as a teacher with a class of high school students.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too Technical., April 5, 2004
This review is from: 100 Writing Remedies: Practical Exercises for Technical Writing (Paperback)
We used this book as one of our texts in a technical and business writing class I had this past semester. The book is divided into eight different sections--not including the introduction, afterword, and appendixes. Each of the sections includes a set of word problems that are supposed to be worked on after reading through the "bugs" in that section. These "bugs" are problems that often occur in the writings found in a technical and business environment. Only about a quarter of these "bugs" (a total of 27 out of 100) are actual grammatical errors. The rest are suggestions the author has made to help those who have trouble writing, to improve their writing--making it easier to read and understand. Most of these suggestions are helpful and will improve a poor writer's basic writing skills. Most of these suggestions are also useful in technical and business writing. However, I do have two major complaints about the book.
1. The book is incredibly boring, even for a textbook on technical and business writing. I'm not for sure what the author could have done to spruce things up, but I do know that I really had to struggle through some of the readings and workbook problems.
2. The suggestions in the book are very legalistic. I had just taken a grammatical analysis course in the previous semester before taking the business and technical writing course where we used this book. A lot of what I learned in grammar analysis was in complete conflict with many of the "suggestions" in WRITING REMEDIES. I read the introduction to WRITING REMEDIES and understand the author's prescriptivist point of view, but I think that there are certain "bugs" in the book that are just too extreme.
Overall, WRITING REMEDIES is a decent book to use for anyone interested in technical and business writing. That's what the book is written for and it performs it purpose well. Other than that, I really wouldn't recommend it. In fact, if you're teaching a high school English class or a college level English 101 class, please don't use this book in your clas because it will scare students away from English rather than draw them to it.
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