by Gretchen Hargis, Michelle Carey, Ann Kilty Hernandez, Polly Hughes, Deirdre Longo, Shannon Rouiller, Elizabeth Wilde
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Product Description
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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Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 best hands-on reference for writing product documentation, 2008-01-27
This is an essential book if you find yourself writing product documentation and do not have the luxury of an editorial staff or company style guide to tell you right from wrong. It's simple and easy to read, and just tells you what you need to know, nothing more or less. You can go through the whole thing cover to cover in about 12 hours, and then you'll have a pretty good sense of how you should be structuring information. I find the examples useful (if somewhat contrived), and I agree with the book's advice in almost all cases. (I'm a professional tech writer, and I *did* have the luxury of an editor for several years! Regrettably, no more.)
Whether the book "enshrines mediocre technical writing," as someone mentioned, is debatable. The goal of product documentation is simple: Answer the user's question as fast as possible, and get the user productive as fast as possible. There's certainly a place for creativity, but one can't lose sight of the goals, and I think the book's merit is that it focuses persistently on those goals: How do you, the writer, best serve the user's interests?
It's also important to have a guide like this because if you work in a small company, other folks are going to have strong ideas about how the documentation should look. They will want to constantly be inserting feel-good "marketing" messages into the documentation, reminding customers of how wise they were for buying the product. They will have strong opinions about what "concepts" should be stressed over and over. As a writer, you represent the user's interests, and you have to be able to stand up and say "that doesn't work to the user's advantage, and we shouldn't do it like that." If you have a reference to back you up on these points, you'll be much more comfortable taking a strong stand in favor of Usability. And, in the end, that is exactly what any documentation specialist should be standing for. (Yes, I did end on a preposition.)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent text, 2007-05-18
I purchased this text because I am trying to redirect my career. I have a lot of marketing and public relations in my background, but technical writing is a new area. I found the text easy to read, very informative, and exceptionally helpful. The only reason I gave it four instead of five stars is that it is weighted for web writers. Writing for the web is not a function of the job I am interviewing for, so that information, while interesting, was not particularly helpful for me.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
 Enshrines mechanics of mediocre technical writing, 2007-04-28
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. And any of the wonderful books on prose style by Richard Lanham or perhaps Mark Turner's Clear and Simple as the Truth (which, suprisingly enough, addresses technical writing directly, albeit briefly, offering a number of classical examples). Also just about any of Edward Tufte's books, and by the way, did you catch his 2004 interview in Technical Communications Quarterly? Posted (free) on ET's website. I think it even mentions a time when he consulted with IBM about their tech writing and tried to get them to stop using the second person, and, well...
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
To master technical writing, 2007-02-12
I have been a technical writer for years. This book has made me re-think how I write technical articles. It is excellent. It has clear, concise instruction and examples. If you are planning to learn more about how to create technical writing this is the book.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Best Book I've Found on the Subject!, 2005-11-01
I've been developing retail software professionally for over 15 years and have been waiting for a book like this one. When I finally discovered the book, I was a little skeptic -- that is until I received the book.
If you are writing help, or any other technical documentation, this *is* the book for you. Coverage of the subject is just right. It's not too overloaded and it's not to light on the subject either.
The only thing missing that I wish they had was recommended templates for different types of documentation. If this book had a CD with samples, it would be worth 2 or 3 times the amount I paid for it.
I highly recommend this book.
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