Writing is an art. And like all other arts, it is a difficult art that requires dedicated effort and hard work to master. One can therefore imagine that writing a book about writing is a tough task. Barry Rosenberg s attempt at this difficult mission falls short of meeting the goal of writing a useful book for engineers and scientists. Although this book has a few good things, the average engineer and scientist can nevertheless safely discard it.

The Spring Into books are intended to provide a brief, but useful introduction to a subject. The publishers evidently want to compete with the popular For Dummies series. I hope that their other books on technical subjects are better than this book. If not, the Spring Into series does not pose any threat to the For Dummies market share.

The book has four sections. The first section provides a general introduction to writing. The second section is probably the most useful part of the book. It covers many of the General Writing Principles. The good thing about this part is that it provides all the good information without being as boring as a regular English grammar text book.

The third section provides information about writing Specific kinds of Documents : Manuals, Web Sites, Proposals, Internal Planning Documents, Lab Reports, Power-Point Presentations, and Email. This section devotes a complete chapter to each of those topics. The chapter on writing technical manuals includes many examples for all the various types of manuals. The examples are helpful in understanding the concepts discussed in the chapter. The contribution made by accumulating different examples, is however, very minimal. Most of the information provided is self-evident and the additional value added by this book is negligible. The other chapters also contain plenty of such examples. A chapter on tips for effective Web site design is incongruous in this book. Web design is a different subject and it is unrelated to technical writing. The chapter on Lab Reports does not contain anything more than what one learned in high school. The chapter on email focuses on trying to encourage people to be more formal in their emails.

The fourth section is about Editing and Producing Documents. This section has three chapters. It is safe to assume that the average engineer is unaware of the details of the editorial process in the publishing industry. The first chapter in this section explains the editorial process. The second chapter deals with fonts and typography; information that can be safely disposed of without any loss. The last chapter provides a few tips on proper punctuation. Rosenberg is right that many people have problems with basic grammar and it is definitely worth studying the important lessons once again.

One of the good things about the book is that every page is one sub-section. There are a few sub-sections that run for more than a page, but in general, every page addresses one topic. The reader can turn to any page and read about a topic from start to end. This layout ensures that every topic is concisely explained. This is particularly attractive to the target audience, who generally appreciate brevity.

The biggest problem with the book is that it attempts to cover too many topics. The end result is that it does not do justice to any topic. In the second chapter of the book, Rosenberg states that the target audience for the book on average holds a master s degree. In most universities, engineers and scientists receive some kind of training, either formal or informal, about technical communication even during their undergraduate course work. All of them would have written reports and given presentations in college. This experience would have also given them the basic information about effective technical communication. People with a master s degree are definitely more aware of these issues. A book that rehashes all the same platitudes is therefore, not very useful. In conclusion, the author s fears about this book, expressed in its editorial introduction, sum it up best: we ve simply spun a twisted ball of clichés .

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