I can not recommend this book.
I wanted to like it. I write, a lot, about technical topics, and am convinced that proper training improve my writing. A few pages in, I found so many errors, both minor and major, that I lost the hope this book would help.
Minor things included the author's micro-management of whether dates in business letters should be punctuated. (Yes or no, can you guess what he requires? Does it matter?) Another minor point was insistence that a certain line in a business memo be underlined. Underlining was never a great way to emphasize text, and has gotten worse since the 1970s writing of the first edition. Underlining has come to mean "link" in the Web era, and it's safe to assume that most memoranda will be viewed electronically. Underlined but unclickable text causes confusion, and causes more confusion if a paper document is ever fed to an OCR scanner. Text recognition is dicey at best, and adding junk to the letterforms can never help.
The major problems include notebooks, resumes, and basic English usage. Scientific and engineering notebooks can sometimes approach the status of legal documents. Proper notes can establish primacy of discovery, and can affect the validity of valuable patents. The best notebooks are permanently bound with printed page numbers, giving some assurance that pages weren't added or removed at some later date. Many engineers also favor grid-ruled pages, for aligning text, as 'training wheels' for uncertain sketching skills, and as aids in tables and graphs. Barrass recommends a combination of lined and unlined pages, interleaved from different sources. I'm glad he discusses professional note-taking at all, but I'm disappointed by the discussion.
Ditto examples. It's great that he presented real text from real publications for critique, and that he stresses the importance of critique. He is simply wrong, however, in asserting (p.36) that "[change] unequalled in magnitude MEANS unequalled." Changes may differ in magnitude, in speed, in visibility, and in as many more dimensions as a creative reader can imagine. I agree that the phrase may be ungainly, and may not be appropriate to the rest of the cited text. Still, it is worthwhile for the writer to point out which aspect of change is under discussion, an idea that Barrass denies.
His suggested resume (p.28) addresses only the needs of a high-schooler (is this the scientist who must write?), and addresses those badly. It really is as grim as you may imagine. The suggested cover letter (p.27) would be pathetic even for a high-schooler. It never even mentions the job's content, let alone the reason that the applicant feels qualified to apply for the job.
I admit, I made it only 36 pages into the 190+ of this book. In those first four chapters, however, I found so much bad advice that I simply could not believe the rest of the book would repay the time spent in reading it. Perhaps the next 150+ pages were filled with wisdom, but my budget of trust for this author is bankrupt. I leave it to the next reviewer to describe the good in this book.
//wiredweird
