Customer Reviews

Procedure Writing: Principles and Practices

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have spent a good part of my career focused on communicating procedures accurately, and teaching others to write good procedures. Wieringa, et al have produced an exceptional roadmap. I use it; I've encouraged lots of other people to use it. This is outstanding work. I highly recommend it.

I love this book. Packed full of info, it's a great reference. Starts with basic info like planning and testing; writing info like syntax, vocabulary, level of detail. Has lots of good format/style info. Writing complex steps section includes conditional statements, logic tables, flow charts, and more.

The writers take their own advice and use simple, direct language that makes it easy to soak in the info.

I'm a technical writer for telephony and high-speed network deployment, where details count. I still refer to this when I get stuck on a procedure. A friend borrowed the book to help her write procedures for the corporate mailroom she manages. I had a hard time getting it back from her.

I found this book to be written for someone that is at a very detailed level of writing procedures. If you are just writing general department procedures this book may not be for you.

To Doug Wieringa,

You added a message to these customer reviews with a very helpful summary of the back-cover contents.

However, because you didn't assign a star-rating to the book, Amazon recorded your review as 0 stars.

This brought the average star-rating down to a really low level. When I first saw the average rating for your book, I thought this meant that the majority of reviewers wrote negative reviews. But this is not the case at all!!

Maybe you can either retract your own review or add some with 5 stars. That's what I just did...

The pickings seemed to be so slim on this topic and this book is so good it has put me on a stratospheric level and in conflict with superiors, that I actually chose to take this subject seriously. Doug Wieringa was also gracious enough to entertain my personal correspondence. If you are in a technical/procedural writing position, this book needs to be in your war chest. Little more needs to be said.

This book remains an excellent source of guidance on procedure writing. It is particularly good at providing guidance on the structure and style of individual procedure steps, simple or complex. The examples provide clear application of nearly all principles. Experienced procedure writers can find new ideas of how to deal with complex steps - without feeling as though a template is dictated. Inexperienced writers will find an appropriate and consistent template embedded in the examples.

The reader/user should keep in mind that the book offers little guidance on procedure content or high-level structure (e.g., organization of steps). These should be driven by a good analysis of the task.

This book contains just the right mix of theory and practical "how-to-do-it". Overall, it's an excellent work.