Customer Reviews

Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, Second Edition (Routledge Study Guides)

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This is the best style guide for technical writing I have ever found. It gives more every day practical information than any of the other technical writing books and gives that information in a highly usable format.

My only complaint--my standard complaint about my reference books--is that the index is far less comprehensive than it ought to be. Given modern computer indexing capabilities, one would think authors and publishers could do a better job.

However, with this is one of the four essential books: 1. Strunk and White, Elements of Style, 2. Prentice Hall, Words Into Type, 3. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (for the British tech writer, Fowler's Modern English Usage) and 4. Ruebens, Science and Technical Writing. With these four, a technical writer can handle almost any situation that arises. There are other books covering special fields that can be added, but these four will always be the bedrock.

If you are a professional technical writer or only an occasional one, you can't go wrong having this book handy on your desktop.

I encourage you to view the excerpt of this book; it will help you, more than any customer review, to see if this book is what you expect or imagine. In the excerpt, I found that chapter 2 starts with a bulleted list of items, without any introduction, any motivation, any explanation, nor comment, exactly like a table of contents. Next, using the same style (bulleted list or table of contents), "develops" each item of the bulleted list. I feel that this type of book would not give much help to write anything. To buy this book is like buying a power point presentation.