Book Reviews: Genre-specific Technical Communication
The Working Voice: Vocal Health and Effective Communication
Stephanie Martin and Olivia Darnley. New York, NY: Routledge. 2024. 338 pages, including index.
Index Terms—effective communication, professional skills, vocal health, voice production
Reviewed by Ardia Pramesti Nurfahmi, Student, Universitas Gadjah Mada, supported by Lembaga Pengelola Dana Pendidikan (LPDP), Indonesia.
The Working Voice: Vocal Health and Effective Communication presents a comprehensive guide for professionals who rely on their voice. This guide covers vocal aspects such as posture, tension release, breathing, resonance, volume, intonation, and effective communication, offering practical ways to enhance skills and maintain vocal health. Self-assessment tools like checklists, questionnaires, and exercises help identify and address vocal challenges. The guide also emphasizes safe and structured practices for achieving vocal health, quality, and authentic presence.
The book explores message organization in rhetoric, highlighting flexible techniques for diverse communication contexts to ensure logical, persuasive, and engaging message structures. It addresses vocal frustrations, fatigue, and inefficiencies resulting from repeated explanations in professional scenarios, stressing the need for high-quality and easily understandable communication methods.
Stephanie Martin and Olivia Darnley highlighted several effective best practices, including the “Safe Screaming” technique, which focuses on increasing vocal volume without damaging the vocal cords. By paying attention to aspects of voice production such as safe breath support and reducing laryngeal tension, individuals can strengthen their voice effectively and safely. Additionally, promoting the 4-7-8 breath technique enhances vocal control with exercises promoting relaxation and stress reduction while emphasizing tension release in the tongue, jaw, and shoulders to improve overall sound quality. Integrating these practices into daily routines helps professionals develop a healthy, expressive voice, supporting effective communication and maintaining vocal health at work.
The book’s strength lies in its comprehensive guidance that blends expert insights, practical exercises, and self-assessment tools to improve vocal performance and professional communication skills. While it provides deep discussions on key aspects of voice production and quality, such as posture, breathing techniques, and resonance, it could benefit from more in-depth coverage of specific vocal disorders and challenges faced by professionals, as well as real-life case studies or examples to enhance application across various work situations.
Overall, The Working Voice serves as an indispensable guide for professionals reliant on their voices, offering practical exercises, self-assessment tools, and expert insights to enhance vocal performance and communication skills. Readers will learn to master breathing techniques, resonance, and voice modulation, developing confident and effective vocal presence across diverse scenarios, thereby fostering greater career success.
Pencil (Object Lessons)
Carol Beggy. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. 2024. 138 pages, including index.
Index Terms—writing technology, history of writing tools
Reviewed by Michelle Gardner
Pencil is one in a series of books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Called Object Lessons, each book starts from a specific inspiration like an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, or a technological innovation. Carol Beggy chose to expose the pencil, a writing implement that has kept its current form for more than three hundred and fifty years.
Reading Pencil brought back childhood memories about their colors and designs, decorative eraser toppers, and pencil cases with built-in sharpeners. And competing to have the most awe-inspiring, envy-inducing, and neatly organized collection. And pondering whether classmates were trustworthy enough to return a borrowed pencil in its original condition.
But pencils aren’t just for students. They are used by animators and artists, novelists and poets, authors and playwrights, composers and musicians, engineers and librarians, and the list goes on. Based on Beggy’s research and writing, these folks have opinions about their pencils. They know when they need a Blackwing 602, a Cedar Pointe #333 2HB, a Musgrave Single Barrel 106, or a Dixon Ticonderoga. Pencil choices are plentiful and there’s one out there that’s the perfect fit for the job.
Chapter 6, “Collectors Versus Users,” tackles questions like, “When does one become a collector?” and “At what point do all these pencils I have become a collection?” (p. 57). The answer to the first question might be when you pay $2,000 for a pencil made by Henry David Thoreau’s family company or join the American Pencil Collectors Society (APCS). The answer to the second question is probably when you have a story for how or why the pencils were acquired or you’ve designated a beneficiary.
Speaking of Thoreau, Beggy takes us to Authors Ridge in the back corner of the historic Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau’s headstone measures “about two-unsharpened-pencils across and the same height at the center peak” (p. 82). His grave is often covered with pencils and other items that evoke his life’s work. It’s fascinating that a pencil can even be used to pay one’s respects.
Pencil is a quick read (113 pages in 10 chapters), and an interesting exploration of where and how pencils are made, what sets them apart from each other, and how they maintain their usefulness and appeal in a world inundated with technology. After all, there’s a reason that an estimated two billion pencils are made worldwide every year.
Business Writing with AI
Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2024. 370 pages, including index.
Index Terms—artificial intelligence, business writing, creativity and expertise, writing process
Reviewed by Michelle Gardner
Business Writing with AI by Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts is a comprehensive guide for novice and experienced business communicators. The book offers valuable insights into using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance business writing, while emphasizing that AI should not replace human intelligence (WI).
The book is structured into 24 chapters where you’ll find a great sampling of the different artificial intelligence (AI) sources you might want to consult in using AI to help create your draft, although you should never rely on it as the complete source of truth. A recommended reading sequence is to start with the Introduction and then read Part 2 (chapters 4–9) to master the writing process. These chapters cover understanding readers, crafting stories, writing drafts, designing for visual impact, honing tone, and polishing prose.
Lindsell-Roberts introduces the WI concept by highlighting that while AI can assist with efficiency and knowledge, it cannot replace the human touch essential for effective communication. She stresses that AI tools should be used to supplement, not replace, human creativity and expertise for those in copywriting and advertising, public relations, journalism and reporting, marketing, freelance, proposal, grant, technical, medical, legal, academic and research, and web content.
For technical communicators, Lindsell-Roberts shares that AI “may not be able to replace the creativity and expertise that people bring to the table. Additionally, user manuals, process documents, statements of work, standard operating procedures, and such often require a high degree of accuracy and clarity, which may be difficult for AI to achieve” (p. 15). Lindsell-Roberts advises that writers should always validate AI-generated content to ensure it meets the needs of their audience. When I use AI to write user stories, I provide a hypothetical situation and then review the given response. I then have a different perspective from this writing assistant to consider on what to accept, reject, or rewrite.
Business Writing with AI discusses various AI applications in writing, such as generating content, enhancing tone, fact-checking, and building tables of content, glossaries, and indexes. AI can help overcome writer’s block by generating outlines, exploring different angles, and improving vocabulary. It can also assist with visual content by analyzing data, suggesting design improvements, and customizing content for specific audiences.
Despite its strengths, the book has some drawbacks, including typos, grammatical issues, and inaccurate URLs for AI tools. Additionally, it lacks an appendix or web companion listing all the referenced AI tools.
Business Writing with AI is a good, yet weak due to the drawbacks mentioned, resource for those wanting to improve their business writing skills, with practical tips on integrating AI to enhance the writing process. Lindsell-Roberts has written many other For Dummies series books on technical writing and other subjects that are far more superior than this one. Don’t discredit this book because of its drawbacks; you may find something useful in it you may not have known about, especially regarding AI.
Writers’ Mistakes: A Handbook of Common Blunders and Ways to Mend Them
Franklin B. Olmsted. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2024. 257 pages, including index.
Index Terms—concise writing, editing techniques, grammatical errors, language improvement, writing mistakes
Reviewed by—Joanne DeVoir, Information Development Manager, Minitab LLC.
Writers’ Mistakes: A Handbook of Common Blunders and Ways to Mend Them is a comprehensive review of writing mistakes and how to correct them. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Franklin B. Olmsted is not a professional writer or educator but is a criminal defense attorney. The governor of Maryland appointed Olmsted to a committee that worked to modernize and re-write state laws to be more understandable. Olmsted’s life-long interest in language and writing is evident on every page.
Writers’ Mistakes contains five chapters that cover ill-chosen words, needless words, awkward sentences, problematic paragraphs, and common grammatical mistakes. The ill-chosen words chapter is a hefty ninety pages and examines issues with abstract nouns, overuse of adjectives, and unnecessarily pretentious words. One of my favorite parts of this chapter is Olmsted’s discussion of malaprops (the misuse of a word by confusing it with another word that sounds similar). The needless words section covers redundant words and meaningless words and phrases. The awkward sentences chapter discusses common causes of such sentences, including passive voice, nonparallel writing, punctuation issues, and sentences that are too long or too complicated. The problematic paragraph content is a brief review of how to avoid paragraphs that are too long or contain too many ideas. The last chapter explains common grammatical mistakes, such as issues with singular and plural words, misuse of “who” and “whom,” and adjectives used as adverbs.
Olmsted illustrates each type of writing error with an impressive number of examples from a variety of genres, including legal and historical documents, works of fiction, and newspaper articles. For each example of a mistake, the author shows how to improve the writing by changing a few words, deleting unnecessary words, or re-writing the sentence altogether. Throughout Writers’ Mistakes, Olmsted uses tables that list common mistakes and a much-improved alternative. I plan to refer to these tables in the future.
I appreciate that Olmsted includes an appendix to define punctuation marks. This information is a nice refresher and reference. I was also glad that the book features a glossary to define terms that I have not thought about since high school English class, such as auxiliary verb, coordinate clause, and relative pronoun.
I was delighted by the humor sprinkled throughout the book. I chuckled when Olmsted discusses the pitfalls of passive voice and writes “we needn’t speak or write as if it came from some disembodied being in the sky” (p. 152). I also appreciate his descriptive names for writing mistakes such as “reckless U-turns” (double negatives) and “windbag sentences” (cluttered sentences).
Writers’ Mistakes is a fun read for any serious lover of the English language and an excellent reference for how to write more clearly, concisely, and accurately.
Rewriting Work
Lora Anderson, ed. Boulder, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse. 2023. 182 pages.
Index Terms—freelance work, professional communication job market, technical communication, workplace adaptability
Reviewed by—Linda M. Davis, Independent Communications Practitioner.
Rewriting Work reports on research in workplace technical communication practices. Although field research and academic programs have a history of collaboration, academic programs, for various reasons, may encounter difficulties in keeping current. To help remedy this, the authors represented in this book have conducted “research into 21st-century workplaces in order to capture…evolutions…in the workplace, workplace writing, and writers’ identities” (p. 5).
The book is broken into seven chapters, each of which highlights the work of different researchers who approach the subject of rewriting work from a different angle. Each chapter is self-contained, including a bibliography, making it easy for the reader to find a topic of interest.
Rewriting Work begins with researchers whose goal is defining the concept of the workplace, acknowledging that research over the past four decades has lacked a unified definition. The authors propose a working definition to ensure long-term applicability and relevance for both academics and practitioners. In another study on workplace, the author explores how the location of the workplace impacts communication, emphasizing the significance of “where-ness” in producing effective communications.
The discussion moves to phatic communication in large, fast-paced organizations, contrasting it with what happens in classroom settings. The author aims to expose students to modern workplace practices and technologies. Other researchers address the growing number of freelance, contract, and gig workers, examining the challenges they face and suggesting ways to enhance collaboration between freelancers and clients. Insights from technical communication leaders at the university of two authors reveal the evolving state of the profession and highlight the need to bridge the gap between academic research and practice.
Researchers in workplace adaptability introduce a model of functional flexibility for technical teams, advocating for a collective approach to overcoming barriers. Finally, researchers of the professional communication job market provide practical advice for entry-level job seekers by analyzing employment ads, offering tips on understanding job requirements, and applying academic experiences to meet employer expectations.
I found Rewriting Work to be interesting as it provides up-to-date information on what’s going on in many varied technical communication workplaces and jobs that were new to me and may be new experiences for the reader.
Knowledge-Making from a Postgraduate Writers’ Circle: A Southern Reflectory
Lucia Thesen. Bristol, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters. 2024. 152 pages, including index.
Index Terms—knowledge-making, radical vulnerability, trace archive, transmodal moments
Reviewed by—Reid Johnson, Student, Technical Communication & Rhetoric, Texas Tech Universit
Writers, whether they’re writing in an academic or industry setting, know too well that the final product of the writing process represents a highly curated and streamlined account of their own knowledge-making efforts. For every completed thesis, proposal, or journal article there are countless conversations, drafts, scribbled half-ideas, and moments of joy or frustration that never see publication. In Knowledge-Making from a Postgraduate Writers’ Circle: A Southern Reflectory, Lucia Thesen seeks to uncover the discarded byproducts of the writing process, materials that make up what she calls the “trace archive” (p. 4), to challenge the binaries of product and waste, knowledge and not knowledge.
Thesen’s book is driven by an ethnographic account of the Thursday writers’ circle, a writing group for graduate and postgraduate students at the University of Cape Town. First established in 2006, Thesen facilitated the circle for many years, notably through the #MustFall protests and larger movement for decolonization in South African universities. As a writer and academic from the global South, Thesen interrogates how knowledge-making is performed from a marginalized position and hopes to disrupt the hegemonic commodification of academic knowledge. Using strategies informed by radical vulnerability and collaboration, Thesen seeks to resist the disembodied, objective voice of traditional academic writing for something human and true to the messy knowledge-making process.
To demonstrate what this type of knowledge-making can look like, Thesen introduces materials from the trace archive to inform her work in this book. Rather than presenting her reader with an objective bird’s eye view of the Thursday writers’ circle, she instead includes transcripts of her notes and reflections on her role as a facilitator. These reflections convey a passion and sense of fulfillment from the work the circle accomplishes, but they also communicate anxiety and frustration with the daily administrative tasks. The notion that a writers’ circle would be a utopian safe space is also dismantled through Thesen’s messy accounts, instead casting it as a “brave space” (p. 19) that invites participants to sit in discomfort and practice vulnerability.
Besides breaks for reflections, Knowledge-Making from a Postgraduate Writers’ Circle is also interspersed with images and sketches from Thesen’s notes and the circles’ archives. Unlike the polished figures and data visualizations that feature in academic literature, the sketches possess a charmingly amateur quality to them. Framed as transmodal moments that invite readers to briefly shift affect and emphasis in the larger stream of text, sketches that played a role in the knowledge-making process are given life in publication instead of being relegated to a long-forgotten notebook or pile of scrap paper. These moments allow readers to reflect on the absurdity of objective, impersonal writing by making the human author apparent.
Knowledge-Making from a Postgraduate Writers’ Circle does not claim to serve as a pedagogical blueprint for establishing a writer’s circle, but instead invites readers to imagine the possibilities of writing in a way that truly honors the writing and knowledge-making process.
How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now
Walter Stephens. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2024. 532 pages.
Index Terms—authenticity, philosophy, writing evolution
Reviewed by—Steven Darian, Emeritus, Rutgers University.
We can glimpse its evolution in Mesopotamia, In the scribes’ efforts to change cuneiform from nothing more than a method of bookkeeping, to a way of immortalizing the great deeds of their kings (p. xii). The same with hieroglyphics: It was only around 2000 BCE that the Egyptian system indicated how to pronounce hieroglyphic signs.
“These centuries witnessed the development from oral to written storytelling, expanding from myth and legend toward something that begins to resemble history” (p. xiii).
This takes us to “The Age of Philosophy;” roughly 600 BCE-400 CE: of texts that originate in written form. Or reach that state fairly soon, in the time of Greek and Roman classics. It saw the emergence of philosophy as a written search for truth––and this is crucial–– rather than a description or declaration of it. Homer was now envisaged as the archetypal author of a text, a single writer with a distinct ideological project; the triumph of written culture had suppressed all memory of how the Iliad and Odyssey gradually accumulated from several centuries of anonymous oral poets.
The Age of Philosophy ended by the weakening of Imperial Roman authority in the West, and the rise of “scriptural” authority under Constantine “and the eventual hegemony of Christian religious culture” (p. xv).
This had its effect on writing: on things like P-O-V, verifiability, gender, etc. The “official” scriptures of all 3 Abrahamic religions could not be questioned: they were the words of god. Moreover, there was only one god. Except for the Persians, who also had a single god, all the great countries and empires in the 4000 years before the appearance of the Hebrews––had hundreds of gods. This included the Egyptians, the Greeks & Romans, and the half a dozen empires that existed in Mesopotamia before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Though described as transcending every aspect of humanity, divinity in monotheism was treated as male and ruled societies that were thoroughly patriarchal (p xiv).
Well into the later times––some say, from the 4th to the 15th century––both scribal editors and their secular commentators battled each other over these issues. It had become a matter of authenticity: How should people distinguish the single, genuine Word of God from all the competing texts that claimed the deity as their author? How many people, even today, know that the New Testament was written originally and entirely in Greek? (p. 110).
The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers
Debbie Berne. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 2024. 248 pages, including index.
Index Terms—book design, publishing, typography
Reviewed by Avon Murphy, Principal, Murphy Editing and Writing Services
Debbie Berne wants her readers to share her respect and even passion for the craft of book design: “You may not even be fully aware that books, aside from their covers, are designed” (p. 2). This book isn’t so much a Chicago Manual of Style for designers as it is a wake-up call to writers and editors to comprehend the significance of design in publishing, which Berne pulls off by sharing fine details of the craft.
You have two ways to read the book: You can methodically go through the text chapter after chapter, letting the details accumulate—this is what I did, and the journey was pleasurable. Or you can try using the book as a reference book. The thorough index makes it possible to find exactly where to go.
Berne frequently writes with a strong love for printed books, at times almost anthropomorphizing elements: “Lowercase letters are all arms and legs, not as tidy [as uppercase letters] but easier to pick out due to their more distinctive shapes. Small caps.…make their point without screaming in your ear” (p. 45).
Interesting and memorable are the author’s thoughts about cover design. She revels in enthusiastically delivered, in-depth descriptions of the myriad things to include on a cover, the impact of genre, the “cover brief” that will help the cover designer understand the book, and the craft of color, type, art, and printing effects such as embossed paper and spot colors that produce “a satisfying tactile quality” (p. 89). Berne is clearly enjoying herself.
I’m a veteran of the electronic publishing wars and a heavy reader of online technical books. So I was curious to see what Berne says in the chapter “Ebooks.” My verdict: This chapter is strange. Berne sounds ill at ease, denigrating the concept of ebooks and not supplying the close-up detail found in other chapters. For some reason she focuses on tools for reading ebooks but makes no mention of a tool such as Adobe InDesign, which many of us use to, well, design books. (She does mention InDesign in passing elsewhere.)
The most technical—and to me the most useful—details come in the chapter “Inside the Book.” We hear of “the seemingly small and mostly unrecognized acts of artistry that allow the type to fade away so the story can emerge” (p. 124). These acts include arrangement of the parts of a book, page design, and the setting of type, all handled with fine examples and passion. The accumulation of so many details reminds me of that old publishing standard, Words into Type (3rd ed., 1974). This chapter most definitely fits the book into the Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing series.
The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers is a publishing insider’s love song to her craft worth relishing.