useful book ( )

4.5 really. One of the most clearly written and helpful technical-writing books I've ever read. ( )

I'm giving it two stars because it did have a handful of helpful points. But only a handful.

I'm working on a book and thought reading this might be a good foundation/review before doing so. I was wrong. I just wasted three months of my time.

The issues are many fold. Firstly the near rage inducing repetition. I could make a hefty list of all the things that were mentioned no less then 30 or 40 times. I wish I were exaggerating. I really do. 90% of the book is information I learned in and around forth grade, and even then it's presented poorly. The bias against research and exploratory research reaches the point of near violence. Everything is a rhetorical battle, not an honest presentation of facts and reason. If I had followed this book during my prior degree I would had done so poorly that I might have been asked to leave.

The STEM bias is carried over to the point of ridiculousness. Anything that cannot carry some dramatic point or solve some earth shattering problem is dismissed out of hand.

Which brings me to the next issue, the "problem". Not everything is a "problem". There is not always going to be a "problem". A great deal of writing is done for relevance to a topic, for the furtherance of understanding for those who work within a field. Or just because the topic is fun and it's fun to learn more about it. Yet the book is near silent on how to make a topic interesting, instead devoting the overwhelming majority of its bulk to "problems". Leading a non-problem reader to look at it and say "so what?"

Both these writing realities are utterly disparaged. If you intend to do either of these styles of writing avoid this book like the plague. It will only frustrate you.

As mentioned before, it does have a few useful points. However I can't help but feel the basic tips could have found in a book that wouldn't have turned out to be to frustratingly useless otherwise.

I did for find a writing guide mentioned in the bibliography that looks promising. If only any of the writers of this book had was it before writing this one. This book is time I'm never getting back. ( )

Required reading for statistical sciences class in graduate school, but it is not graduate level. Overly simplistic. ( )

A fairly good introduction on how to write research papers and reports. I got this while writing my masters thesis, have read through once, and will definitely come back to the relevant chapters when I start reviewing my draft. The explanations are quite good, and it formalizes some things I had mostly done intuitively until now.

So, if you are a researcher or a student tasked with writing a research paper, I can recommend this book, especially since it will not bankrupt you. ( )