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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my most-recommended books for technical people, April 6, 2002
This review is from: E Writing: 21st Century Tools for Effective Communication (Paperback)
I manage a team of software developers. Like me, they and other technical people tend to be too verbose in their emails, not being clear about what action needs to be taken, formatting poorly, etc. What we learn liberal arts colleges is an academic communication style that is too verbose, takes too long to get to the point, and full of information in all the wrong places. Technical schools, on the other hand, often don't teach anything about writing, sometimes leaving their graduates unclear on how to communicate except on detailed, technical subjects. Booher has written a very accessible book that addresses good writing from a non-pedantic, not-your-high-school-english class perspective. I kept this book at my side while writing a proposal that had to be content-dense yet short and readable. I have since bought several copies of her book to hand out to people around the office. Communication is very difficult, made even harder by the 'words only' content of email. Today we are interacting primarily in email with our customers and the management chain. Booher explains how to significantly increase the chance that your emails are read and acted upon, providing good boosts to your career, reduced chances of "what do you mean you asked me to do something?" problems, and ways for you to improve your reputation as an effective, competent employee. Her attention to whitespace and formatting is, in my opinion, very useful. I've since become a lot more aware of how much more readable my communications are when I take time to include lists, blank lines, headers, etc. to help the reader break up my content into digestable chunks. A key learning: remembering that the reader is not simply waiting on the edge of his chair to devour every word of my carefully crafted email but, rather, sees it as yet another stream of words in the midst of a flood that he has to quickly evaluate for its usefulness and relevance. She includes many "Good", "Bad", "Okay but could be better" examples for those who learn by example, rules for those who like rules, and just the right amount of verbiage to convey the concepts without violating her own rules of conciseness. I have not found the 'email ettiquette' portions nearly as useful, nor the detailed grammar section. But if you're new to office email, or need a brushup on your high school grammar (complete with good examples), you will find them helpful. Despite those two sections, I found the book gave more than enough value for its cost, and it has earned a place on my short 'review on occassion and keep close to hand' list of books. From the length of this review, you can see I haven't completely mastered all of her techniques. But she has led to noticable improvements in my writing, and I'm on the right path.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
E-Mail and More, October 5, 2001
This review is from: E Writing: 21st Century Tools for Effective Communication (Paperback)
When I first picked-up this book, I expected a pedantic approach to creating quick-and-dirty e-mails. There is some attention to e-mail correspondence, but this volume is considerably more comprehensive than what I expected. Young people, particularly, highly oriented to computers and e-mail will benefit greatly from this book. So will people in administrative roles where writing clearly and succinctly is so critically important in this sped-up world. After 60-some pages on writing for the electronic medium, Booher launches into a wealth of material on good writing principles in general. On one hand, one could say this content takes us away from the title of the book. On the other hand, what Booher has done is really valuable for the reader: everything you need to know to put together good letters, memos, reports, proposals, meeting minutes-it's all here in one place. There's even a five-chapter section on editing! Want more than this? Bonuses include a glossary of grammatical terms (Miss Hardy would have loved for me to know all this stuff back in high school). E-Writing will serve as a good reference manual as well as a helpful book to read from cover to cover. The layout makes it easy to understand, as well as find what you're looking for. The comprehensive index is also helpful.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Improve Clarity, Conciseness and Style of your E-Writing, February 18, 2005
This review is from: E Writing: 21st Century Tools for Effective Communication (Paperback)
The book reiterates e-mail etiquette (Netiquette) originally published by Sally Hambridge as RFC1855, but adds valuable advices that are frequently overlooked by the other authors who write about e-mail etiquette in their books and web sites. Such advices are:
- If you don't have something to say, don't say it - not all e-mails deserve responses;
- Use internationally recognizable dates, and measurements when appropriate. (Is 3/9 meant to be read as March 9 or September 3?);
- Don't post "Action or Else" messages if action is irreversible;
- Use "For Your Information Only" tags (to the messages that require no action) to help others manage their e-mail volume;
- Don't forward messages without adding your own note to tell the recipient why;
- Keep one topic in each e-mail
However, some of the author's suggestions seem to fit only dumb e-mail clients. Such suggestions are "highlight responses in colour to aid reading" or "cut and paste rather than big Reply on long, continuing e-mails". The e-mail clients like "The Bat!" that naturally support quoting have these problems already solved, the quotes there are automatically highlighted and you can type your reply paragraphs between the original text without being afraid of messing the lines.
The author encourages composing clear, to-the-point messages. She proposes to highlight the readers' action, to not be cryptic, and to not remove the actors. By examples she helps to create informative subject lines that get quick responses and help readers prioritize.
Seven pages of the book will tell you how to manage high-volume e-mail effectively. "Use last-in-first-out, group read later emails into a file and out of sight". I would recommend the book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" by David Allen who addresses the issue of stress-free e-mail management much better than Dianna Booher.
In the chapters about writing on the paper or online, she proposes so-called "Descending Outline" and the MADE™ format (Message-Action-Detail-Evidence).
She also mentions the "idea wheel" outlining method to arrange your thoughts, which is a simplified technique of Tony Buzan's "mind maps". I would like to recommend you "The Mind Map Book" Tony Buzan and the other books by this author to maximize your brain's untapped potential.
A major chapter of this book is devoted to English grammar. You have probably learnt this at school, but a good repetition should still be helpful. The other big chapters are devoted to layout, clarity, conciseness and style, own chapter per each of the points. I will be working further on these grammar, clarity, conciseness and style chapters, and will be for sure re-reading them in future.
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