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I am always looking for good books on writing, both to improve my own skills and to recommend to students and colleagues. The three books reviewed here are recent additions to a rather large literature. All are valuable resources for both students and professionals. Scientists Must Write is an extensive revision of a book originally published in 1978. In addition to excellent general advice on writing, it provides specific advice on writing scientific articles. Like any good style guide, Barrass’s book discusses the elements of good prose but then goes on to provide guidance on aspects of communication that are important to scientists, including tables, graphs, and illustrations. I was particularly impressed with chapter 6, “Choosing Words”, which gives excellent advice on how to tighten prose by eliminating superfluous words. This chapter includes tables of circumlocutions matched with simpler alternatives that could replace them. The book concludes with a nice chapter on oral communication. Science and Technology Research is actually not a book about writing but instead an excellent guide to literature research and evaluation skills. It provides a step-by-step strategy for searching the literature: books, journals, government resources, and the World Wide Web. Most important, it discusses the evaluation of the quality of the information you find. This is a great book to recommend to students about to confront a research library for the first time. All faculty have to write recommendation letters and Joe Shall’s delightful little handbook, Writing Recommendation Letters, shows how to write more effective ones. Chapter 1 is generic, covering the basics: not only does it give advice on format and style, it also discusses issues you should consider before writing a letter, including when to say no. It concludes with several examples of common types of letters. Chapter 2 concerns recommendations for competitive scholarships, including NSF fellowships. If you have a talented undergraduate who is applying for one of the prestigious postgraduate scholarships—Rhodes, Marshall, Truman and the like—Schall provides specific advice and guidelines for those programs, including sample letters. The book concludes with an excellent page of advice to students on how to ask for a recommendation and what to provide the person writing the recommendation.
All three of these books will find a place on my shelf of writing references where I can quickly find them. They are likely to become well thumbed.
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