I'm not a student anymore, but I was once a scientist. This guide interested me because I figured it would be clearer and more practical than other writing guides. I write for an entertainment website right now, and have found the manual useful. It's not really the subject matter that is an issue when it comes to writing, but the desired clarity of communication, and I desired clarity.It's a really excellent, thorough guide, which I use mainly for reference. Although my current area of writing is in entertainment, bringing scientific rigour to it certainly makes it better writing. On the other hand, I recognise that for us scientists, it's more useful to have a straight-up no nonsense guide, than digging up a buried hook in a more flowery book. It might be more than an average undergrad is interested in, but certainly for anyone who needs to write important papers at postgrad level, who wants a little extra support in constructing clear work, this should be helpful. It starts at the basics of the purpose of clear writing, and moving on to basic grammar and sentence construction, to addressing the overarching themes over the course of a piece of writing.On the downside, it can be a little dense, and sometimes the conciseness of the guide itself makes accessing it hard work. For someone with less previous exposure to grammar, this may not be the right book. It's the kind of book best mined if you have the time to study it a little more deeply. It's worthwhile, but it's not casual!

Even if writing may seem easy, writing well and effectively in order to achieve a challenging objective is not. Examples of such challenging objectives include writing to obtain funding, influence policy makers, communicate information to students and others. The development of writing to achieve such goals well is somewhat analogous to the development of building architecture that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.This book, by Dr. Robert Berger, is a scientific approach to writing for engineers and scientists, that allows the communication of complex ideas in simple and clear terms. It provides a systematic approach to writing, discussing the content, formatting and structure, with many useful examples.Dr. Robert Berger’s background as a scientist, former Small Business Innovation Research / Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy SBIR programs and teacher of many workshops has the right talents to do this. He has done a superb job. This book can be useful to a broad range of users in industry, academia and government, especially including those writers that speak English as a second language. I strongly recommend the reading and application of this book.

For a while I studied electrical engineering and if events had taken a different path I may have pursued a career in this field. Nevertheless I have always maintained an interest in this field but I'd say an interest in the field itself is not justification enough to warrant reading this book.I found it a quite laborious read. Rather pedantic in places. I don't see the real importance or difference it makes in constructing sentences by moving around the word 'and' so that you can have one longer sentence instead of two shorter ones which otherwise relay exactly the same information and with the same wording.I did find it unneccessarily complicated and jargon filled and it sort of did irritate me after a while. It is good from a grammatical point of view and if you are actively working in the field or writing reports as part of a study assignment it can at least be referenced but I don't think I'll be referring to it again in a hurry.

A handy reference book this for technical report writing. It's well organised and succinctly presented and although detailed, I haven't found it too 'heavy.'There's plenty of examples of good practise and a decent enough rules-based system is presented and clearly explained. The premise that scientists, engineers and other technical experts are well versed in the complex of systems of their field, but find it difficult to translate that into clear report presentation, is a valid and common one. I think this book- handily sized and very accessible- goes a long way to help professionals bridge that gap between practise and narrative.

I got this book for my husband who works as an engineer in the rail industry and has to prepare reports on a regular basis.His views of the book are:It is comprehensive and well laid out, easy to followIt is aimed at a fairly high level of professional, and the blurb on the back should really indicate this.There are some good examples of reports included in the bookThe book would be a useful reference tool when writing reports, but is not the type of book that would be read 'cover to cover'