2001 Preface

You may have difficulty writing, or you may have heard from professors or reviewers that your writing is hard to follow. Or you may have studied writing only in the context of literature, and have trouble translating your skills into a technical setting. Enough students have these difficulties that I have invested significant effort in helping students become comfortable, fluent, clear technical writers. This booklet explains how to study technical writing in the context of a weekly group. If nothing else, a group will show you that you are not alone in your difficulties. Problems you may have are problems that others also have, and you can find similar problems even in published papers. But we do not emphasize problems; instead we emphasize useful principles and practices—engineering heuristics—that you can learn to apply to your own manuscripts. • I emphasize principles that can be applied successfully by a beginning writer. Es-pecially for students in science and engineering, a principle is easily applicable when there is a simple, experimental way to decide if the written words obey the principle. (For example, I do not try to teach “omit needless words, ” because I know of no simpl