Customer Reviews:
I recommed it to my students.......2005-02-17
I am a law professor and this is the one book about legal writing I recommend to my students. However, please note that this book is not a textbook. There are better textbooks to teach [and learn] analytical thinking, persuasive writing and legal research. What this book provides is a great quick reference guide to some of the most common problems in writing in general and legal writing in particular. The book is well organized and concise. The material is organized around short rules and for every rule there are good examples of poor writing and suggestions on how to improve it.
Accurate but dry........2001-11-21
Go ahead and use this book as a reference. Skim it once in a while to refresh your memory about correct legal style. But don't sit down and read it straight through, as I did. I found it slow going and dry.
Not bad, but nothing new.......2001-06-03
This book is one of many on legal writing. The information usually stays the same even though the titles change. It would be a good start for an attorney with little background in writing. But if you've read other books on legal writing, pass this one by.
Along Came A Legal Writer.......2001-04-23
THE ELEMENTS OF LEGAL WRITING nowadays are clear, simple everyday language avoiding lawyerisms and following standard grammar and word order. Computer and word processing graphic design and typeface breakthroughs make how documents look important: text in attractively manageable chunks, such as paragraphs each generally running no longer than about 1/4-1/2 of the page, and with descriptive headings, footnotes and transitions prioritizing orderly presentation of ideas and respecting the visually balancing role of white space. Authors Martha Faulk and Irving M Mehler review effective format, grammar, organization, tone, and word order choices. Their book would interest readers of Clarice R Cox and Jerrold G Brown's REPORT WRITING FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE PROFESSIONALS, THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND CRIMINOLOGY ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB, Barbara Frazee and Joseph N Davis' PAINLESS POLICE REPORT WRITING, and Don MacLeod's THE INTERNET GUIDE FOR THE LEGAL RESEARCHER
Book Description
The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing offers the ideal combination of comprehensive coverage, accessibility, and convenience. It supplies grammatical and stylistic information, provides the key format elements of common technical documents along with illustrative examples, guides authors in the effective use of visual information, and helps writers revise and edit their own work as well as review that of others.
The Mayfield Electronic Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, which is platform-independent and can interact with several applications at once, can be used alone or accompanied by the printed version.
Customer Reviews:
A broad based handbook.......2007-01-10
This Handbook, both in its content and construction, is one of the most effective Technical Writing guides I've found. It is convenient to use, and each covered topic area is easily found. It is broadbased enough so that it generally is the only tech writing reference one needs at hand, and in itself is a fine example of what technical writing is all about.
Great Resource.......2000-11-02
This book is one of the best of its type that I have seen. A very handy reference for anyone doing documentation.
The best book I ever seen in this field........1999-03-09
It has been the best company as I have been writing my Master's thesis in the computer science field. Whenever I vacillate about how to write or present something in the proper way, I consult with this amazing manual. The ideal answer is "always" there. It is still expensive, but surely I invested my money in the correct place. Thanks for all who participated to introduce such a marvellous product.
Average customer rating:
- The resource I keep coming back to...
- Not what the title explains
- The benchmark in its field
- Thoughtful, but overly long and loosely held together
- Terribly wordy - lots of deadwood
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Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers
Karen A. Schriver
Manufacturer: Wiley
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Similar Items:
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Human Factors for Technical Communicators
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Standards for Online Communication
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Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
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Technical Communication: A Reader-Centered Approach
ASIN: 0471306363 |
Book Description
From an international leader in document design, research-based insights about writing and visualizing documents that people can use . . .
This book is for writers and graphic designers who create the many types of documents people use every day at home or school, in business or government. From high-tech instruction manuals and textbooks to health communications and information graphics, to online information and World Wide Web pages, this book offers one of the first research-based portraits of what readers need from documents and of how document designers can take those needs into account.
Drawing on research about how people interpret words and pictures, this book presents a new and more complete image of the readerâa person who is not only trying to understand prose and graphics but who is responding to them aesthetically and emotionally.
Written by document design expert Karen A. Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design features:
- Case studies of documents before and after revision, showing how people think and feel about them
- Analyses of the interplay of text and pictures, revealing how words, space, visuals, and typography can work together
- A fascinating and informative timeline of the international evolution of document design from 1900 to the present
Customer Reviews:
The resource I keep coming back to..........2005-08-10
This book is the most useful one I've found on the subject. Design books of all stripes (document-design focused or otherwise) have a tendency to provide "principles" without ever providing real support for said principles. Books will be loaded with recommendations that may or may not be well supported by data, quantified or at least well documented study results, etc.
Schriver's book does exactly the opposite, and this is why it is longer than many others. It is impossible to read about Schriver's document design principles and not know exactly where they came from. Virtually every recommendation is, for once, well supported by research findings. This book never tells you to do something without first explaining why it should be done.
If you're looking for a short-and-sweet book that conveys the most basic principles of document design ("principles" that may in fact be a designer's personal preferences), this isn't it.
If you're looking for a book that will help you make better design decisions and help you understand why to make these decisions over others, then this is the book for you. After all, it isn't so unusual for professional designers and others in the workplace to have to explain exactly why they've made certain choices over others, and this book can help.
Not what the title explains.......2005-04-26
This book could be cut off to more than half pages it is now. The information is over explained and reader gets bored.
Better luck next time!
The benchmark in its field.......2005-03-06
The reviewers who say this book is wordy and over-long just don't get it. This is not a "how to do it in five easy lessons" handbook. If you find a book like that - burn it! Books like that are usually self-published by amateurs who don't understand the complexities of the field, and they are worse than useless. In fact, they are often filled with advice that has been so oversimplified that it is actually wrong. You CANNOT learn document design in five easy lessons.
Conversely, Schriver's book is a refreshingly thoughtful, well-researched, and comprehensive overview of document design. It starts with the history and philosophy of document design and continues through contemporary needs and trends. It contains especially strong advocacy for usability studies, including documentation of those conducted by the author and her colleagues. It's about time we document creators stopped "blaming the user" and started taking responsibility to make improvements when documents are hard to understand.
Document design is a relatively new field of study, so the comprehensive timeline of its development is a gold mine, especially since no author has attempted it before. This type of in-depth research is sorely needed.
Schriver explains things in a way that is clear and compelling, with lots of thoroughly documented examples and supporting charts, tables, and graphics for clarification. And her research spans several decades, which is invaluable for tracking the evolution of document design. She has produced an unparalleled work which will be the benchmark against which other books are measured for a long time.
Thoughtful, but overly long and loosely held together.......2003-11-22
For an author who believes in giving priority to readers, she actually does a rather poor job considering her reader. She is an academic and as such has the foible of wanting to put all her knowledge on display. So she's done little trimming and condensing of her material into a form that is really useful to readers who want to quickly get to core ideas about document design theory and practice.
The opening chapter abstracts are unnecessarily long, and just repeat what shortly follows in the body of the chapter. While I liked the way she put document design in a social and historical context, this could have been done much more succinctly. The long timeline is too tangentially related to what readers really want to know about, namely document design, to interest many of them. It seems included because the professor did a lot of research and just hated not to have more to show for it than a few succinct paragraphs.
Later chapters presenting the results of various reader response studies are interesting enough, but surely we could move more quickly to the results and their relevance to document design without spending so much time with dry narration of the actual empirical testing.
The theoretical section offers a long overview of theoretical approaches, arguing in favor of a rhetorical approach. Yet the chapters that go on to apply the theory offer advice and conclusions that hardly seem to warrant such a heavyweight theoretical foundation. For instance, the chapter on typography just offers familiar practical advice of the sort one gets in many introductory books on typography. The same is true about the long section about grids. All the opening theory favoring rhetorical approaches yields results that sound very close to the plain old common sense of the non-theoretical how-to craft school that gets debunked in the opening. So she does not end up making a very strong case for the value of her own theoretical approach, and we feel we waded through a lot of theory without much benefit.
In reality, I think she does have a case and she does have some good examples of how attending to the reader through empirical research can improve document design. But her ideas would be much more forcefully and usefully presented in 200 as opposed to 500 pages.
Terribly wordy - lots of deadwood.......2003-01-29
Sorry - I would not recommend this book to a TECHNICAL writer.
This book has 559 pages and could be cut down to maybe 100 pages of useful information. Each chapter has a full page explaining the chapter... if you have to do that, you haven't planned and written the chapter well. A good product sells itself.
It takes the author 5 pages in the preface to explain the book! It also has a lot of side head paragraphs explaining more... explaining the explanations. This book was painful reading for me... I kept thinking "bla bla bla bla bla"
This book seems to have a lot of the author's opinions and theory, but not very much practical information.
Average customer rating:
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Handbook for Preparing Engineering Documents: From Concept to Completion
Joan G. Nagle
Manufacturer: Wiley-IEEE Press
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ASIN: 0780310977 |
Book Description
State-of-the-art in its simple, user-friendly presentation, this comprehensive handbook covers the entire process of preparing, producing, and distributing engineering documents using current computer software and the most recent technologies in information transfer. Available in both hardcover and softcover versions!
Sponsored by:
IEEE Professional Communications Society
Customer Reviews:
Technical Communication by Mike Markel.......2007-10-10
I think the book is good , specially for the beginners , but certainly the price is more.
text book.......2007-08-05
won't know till it's used in class, is a hard and expensive text to find
Best Technical Writing Textbook I Have Seen.......2007-07-26
Being very nervous about my first semester as a technical writing instructor, I pored over about half-a-dozen different books to get ideas and to see which textbook would be best to teach in the future. In spite of its shocking price, this book won hands-down.
This book (even more than the 7th edition) does an excellent job of taking students through the process of creating documents, helping students to understand the parts of the document and what each part does, and also gives some helpful sample documents. Unlike many technical writing texts which I have seen, both ethical and rhetorical issues are treated effectively and simply, while a good balance is struck between nuts-and-bolts grammar and formatting advice and discussions of audience awareness, credibility, and tone.
This book also has a number of helpful "Guidelines" boxes, wherein specific, concrete advice for particular writing tasks is given in a straightforward bulleted list. There is also some useful material on the companion website.
Overall, aside from the high price and the sometimes too-intense use of color and formatting features to draw attention to every little thing, this book is extremely useful for aspiring technical communicators.
An excellenct book to technical writting.......2007-02-07
I used this book for a junior composition class I took. I am terrible at writting and this book made it a lot easier the examples are well laid out and the material is as well. A good technical book. It helped me write a resume that worked.
Fastest shipping ever. Book in great/ like new condition........2007-01-12
Fastest shipping ever. Book in great/ like new condition.
Customer Reviews:
Compulsory Reading!.......2005-07-23
I think Dr. Weiss's new book, "The Elements of International English Style" should be compulsory reading for anyone who creates documentation, with the possible exception of literary works. He rightly places the responsibility of the legibility of a document on the writer, rather than the reader who should be concentrating on the ideas or processes discussed, without having to struggle with the medium. Well done!
Nurel Beylerian Ph.D., PE
A "Strunk and White" for the 21st Century and the Internet.......2005-06-19
With the publication of The Elements of International English Style, Dr. Edmond Weiss has provided writers a "Strunk and White" for the 21st Century and the Internet. He does this through a stimulating presentation of coherent principles -- simplicity, clarity, correspondence, cultural adaptation; through rules of usage presented as 57 tactics for writers; and through numerous helpful examples and illustrations. Writers of English in a global environment have a wise and valuable guide and resource in Dr. Weiss and his book.
Required Reading for Business and Technical Writing.......2005-06-13
For about 10 years, I have given every new employee of my engineering firm a copy of Edmond Weiss's 100 Writing Remedies. I came across International English when I was ordering new copies and now I'm going to give this one to new employees also. There's something that business and technical people need to know on every page. And I had a shock of recognition when he explained why "yes" doesn't always mean "yes" in negotiations with "high context" suppliers. I hope the business schools will make this book required reading.
Many useful ideas; could use better editing.......2005-06-02
As a translator and writer who often produces English documents for readers who are not native speakers of English, I have long wrestled with the problem of how to adapt my English writing style so that it is understandable to the widest possible audience. This book offers many useful ideas and pointers for people like me: avoid ambiguous and culturally-bound expressions, anticipate how individual words will be translated by readers into their native languages, avoid sarcasm and humor, and much more. I thus recommend this book strongly.
I wish, though, that it had been more carefully edited. In my first few minutes of skimming through it, I came upon several embarrassing errors: "The shorter Oxford English Dictionary has 25,000 entries" (p. 17) should be "The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has [some much larger number of] entries"; references to "German-English" and "Hebrew-English" dictionaries (pp. 21-22) should be to "English-German" and "English-Hebrew" dictionaries; the example sentence "an investigate trail is cold" (p. 23) must be a typo (of "an investigation trail is cold"?); examples of hyphenation usage (p. 74) are unclear because the examples appear at the ends of lines; and an example text that is described as being in a mono-spaced font (p. 82) is in fact in a proportional font. Such mistakes distract from the book's overall worth.
Book Description
Starting a Documentation Group is the only book devoted to getting a new group up and running in a small company. Drawing on the author's 20 years of experience in starting, rebuilding, and managing documentation groupsas well as input from many of his peersthis book provides a detailed collection of techniques, processes, and guidelines to help you quickly set up an efficient and professional documentation operation.
In addition, the appendixes include a description of the product development process, sample templates and job descriptions, and questions to ask during the hiring process.
Although Starting a Documentation Group was designed and written with new group leaders in mind, it is also full of relevant and useful information for veterans.
Focusing on the needs of small companies, Starting a Documentation Group provides information on:
How the experience of a start-up/small group is different from that of a large group/company The role of the documentation manager
Setting up your environment
How to develop a comprehensive, forward-looking documentation planand sell it to management
Determining a realistic schedule (or, at least, how to live with the time available) Planning for editing, production, and printing
Determining when extra help is needed and hiring accordingly
Customer Reviews:
Great starting point.......2005-07-20
This book is a great companion to Managing Your Documentation Projects by Dr. Hackos. It describes a concise, straightforward approach for publications managers or technical writers interested in advancing their skills or taking their department in a more focused direction. And, it provides a clear blueprint for how to position the publications group in the software development lifecycle. I highly recommend this book.
Good Resource, Especially for Small Groups.......2001-04-17
When I asked a colleague if he would recommend this book, he said, "Well, there's a lot in there you already know." He's right. After 13 years as a tech writer, there's a lot I already know, but there's also a lot I might have forgotten. Hartman's readable book is a gentle reminder, among other things, of processes we may have forgotten, and of the big picture of writing documentation.
Another reason I found it useful was that it is tailored to small and startup organizations. In small companies, processes are trimmed and schedules are more compressed. If you've worked in large companies during your career and are thinking of joining a smaller company, Hartman's book tells you what to expect.
Hartman's suggestions on how to start, schedule, and staff projects may seem obvious to someone who's done it for years, but I found it interesting to see how someone else did it. My manager, who has not managed a doc group before, also read this book so she could see what the processes are in a well-run doc group. She's also going to try his suggestions for setting up a doc project in Microsoft Project: she and I have spent quite a few days trying to get it right, and we're hoping his suggestions help.
My only disagreement with him is in his statement where documentation groups belong in the organizational structure. Hartman is firm in his suggestion that documentation groups belong under Engineering. He overlooks reporting to Support, which can work extremely well. Nor does he mention that some Engineering groups treat doc personnel as second class citizens because they are not as technical as the Engineers. In extreme cases, they're treated as little more than technical typists; at best, they are not given the respect, authority, and freedom to act that they need to be true user advocates.
All in all, Hartman appears to follow widely accepted rules of good practice and presents his ideas in readable, enjoyable form.
I think it's a great resource for new managers or those who find doc managers in their reporting structure. As I said, it's also very valuable for people who worked in large organizations and are now working for smaller ones. Managers of organizations that are downsizing or spinning off smaller companies might also find it useful.
A Must for a New Technical Writer's Bookshelf.......2001-02-01
I bought this book with an Amazon Christmas gift certificate from my supervisor. It was one of the wisest investments of my career! Hartman takes you through every step to develop a successful technical writing group.
You are taken through the development process and project planning; the tasks of naming your group and getting necessary resources. You learn how to hire new employees, develop a style guide, write functional specs, and an information plan. The product development process is outlined with a summary and definition of the stages involved and the deliverables required at each stage.
Project planning is covered quite well, but I would advise purchasing "Managing Your Documentation Project" (JoAnn Hackos), "Developing Quality Technical Information" (Gretchen Hargis), and "One Minute Designer" (Roger C. Parker). This combination is like having an entire technical writing curriculum at your fingertips.
Average customer rating:
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The Practical Technical Writer: Planning and Producing Documents
Arnold Keller
Manufacturer: Longman
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ASIN: 0321100123 |
Book Description
Arnold Keller's The Practical Technical Writer has a distinct competitive edge over other professional and technical writing books currently available. Rather than overwhelming readers with endless rules dealing with usage and style, this exciting new text offers sound and practical advice based on step-by-step procedures, ideas, checklists, and practice exercises. Students will also learn how technology can make writing more efficient. Includes concise coverage and examples of how to create and design successful technical print and electronic documents including proposals, instructions, specifications, documentation, procedures, reports, and memos. Also includes coverage of such issues as persuasion, oral communication, writing news releases, and writing online. This book is for any professional who wants a concise guide to becoming a better communicator in the technical professions.
Books:
- The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative
- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
- The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning: A Project of the Music Educators National Conference
- The Order of Things: How Everything in the World Is Organized into Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders; Revised Edition
- The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
- The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert
- The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization
- The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
- The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
- The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Books Index
Books Home
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LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Series on Tools and Techniques for Computer T)
Math Into LaTeX
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