Good Style: Writing for Science and Technology

by John Kirkman

Good Style explains the tactics that can be used to write technical material in a coherent, readable style. It discusses in detail the choices of vocabulary, phrasing and sentence structure and each piece of advice is based on evidence of the styles prefered by technical readers and supported by many examples of writing from a variety of technical contexts. John Kirkman draws from his many years of experience lecturing on communication studies in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Hong Kong, both in academic programmes and in courses for large companies, research centres and government departments. Good Style has become a standard reference book on the shelf of students of science, technology and computing and is an essential aid to all professionals whose work involves writing of reports, papers, guides, manuals or on-screen texts. This new edition also includes information on writing for the web and additional examples of how to express medical and life-science information.

Genres: Writing

230 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 1992

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only skimmed through this book. John Kirkman based his book on surveys he distributed to professional scientists in order to rate the acceptability and readability of different scientific texts. He took what they called ‘good style’ and presented it in the book, including points on active voice, sentence length/complexity, weight/familiarity of vocabulary, verbs, and some technological writing that I skipped over. This is a mix of style guide and rule book. I suggest it for writers of scientific material.

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clear and easy to understand and implement in writing English texts particularly scientific texts. I wish I had read this book before writing my thesis. But never is late 😃