Rating:
(23 reviews)
Author: Gretchen Hargis Michelle Carey Ann Kilty Hernandez Polly Hughes Deirdre Longo Shannon Rouiller Elizabeth Wilde
ISBN : 0131477498
New from $29.48
Format: PDF, EPUB
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The book presents a much needed approach to quality technical communication and a working plan for achieving quality. The examples are excellent and are easy to use and adapt. The editorial advice is simple and clear enough for tech writers who did not major in English or journalism. It is most worthy of a text in university programs, but it is more valuable to experienced writers, editors and managers concerned with raising the quality of their publications. The main difference between this and other books is that in each of the first nine chapters, one quality characteristic is presented that you can apply to your writing project to make technical information easy to use, easy to understand and easy to find. There are checklists at the end of each chapter for review and a Quality checklist in the appendix covering all of the characteristics. The book shows original text and revision text so that you can actually browse the book and see the differences applied. This is another excellent feature that should catch a purchaser's eye.
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- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: IBM Press; 2 edition (April 16, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0131477498
- ISBN-13: 978-0131477490
- Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 6.9 x 9.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors Free Download
This book is a mixed bag at best, advocating practices that help keep today's technical writing mired in mediocrity. For example: always use the 2nd person; and for heaven's sake don't try to explain anything to people, just tell them what to do! Much of this reads like tips for helping non-writers get by as technical writers, and for making technical writing into a kind of non-writing.
For devotees of the Jackson Pollock school of tech writing (throw lots of vetted statements at the page till they stick) or of the everything-is-a-numbered-list technique, there's probably much that's heartening in this glossy example of bad desktop publishing. (Jeesh, who decreed that tech writers can't learn typography and basic functional layout, or maybe hire someone that does?)
This book is probably ok for anyone writing product assembly manuals, or documenting GUI interfaces (press this, select that... yup second person actually works pretty well there). But for software? Or for anyone struggling to articulate complex ideas or just write a reasonably compact and self-contained conceptual overview (MIA from most tech writing today), there isn't much help here. Maybe it's time we technical writers focused more on good writing per se, on the things that good technical writing shares with effective prose (clarity, precision, range of useful styles), fiction (point of view) or even poetry (compression, effective use of embedded metaphor).
So, yeah, it turns out there're so many other rich directions and ideas for tech writers to pursue. For starters, there're the old standbys: Strunk and White or Wm Zinsser's Writing Well.
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