Book Reviews: Technical, Scientific, & Engineering Writing
Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning
José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2024. 270 pages, including index.
Index Terms—AI in education, curriculum development, cheating policies, pedagogical tools, teaching strategies
Reviewed by Gregory Zobel, Associated Professor, Western Oregon University.
José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson’s Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning engages readers. Unlike many recent books about artificial intelligence (AI), Bowen and Watson’s book is not a collection of past blog posts. Rather, this work is a research-driven educator’s guide that addresses pedagogical questions and concerns. This book emphasizes teaching in higher education by using many prompts, activities, and scenarios that are also applicable for secondary education teachers.
The authors divide the book into three sections—thinking, teaching, and learning with AI—with each section having four chapters. They do not spend too much time on AI basics or general social impact. Readers new to AI, but interested in teaching with AI, would do well to first read Ethan Mollick’s (2024) book, Co-Intelligence, which sets a foundation which helpfully informs Bowen and Watson’s Teaching with AI.
The authors address the biggest concerns about AI in education such as cheating with AI, creating AI policies, and what does “good” work look like. This book is unlike most LinkedIn or YouTube content about AI and education. The book is clear, persuasive, and robust, as well as includes diverse prompts for different assignments, contexts, and learning activities that fill dozens of pages.
Bowen and Watson address the hype that “everyone is cheating.” They identify many areas where faculty and educators have lots of work to do. In short, revising and redeveloping curricula, assessments, in-class activities, and assignments. Bowen and Watson offer clear guides, suggested prompts with iterations, and plentiful potential ideas.
This book is best suited for several audiences. First, educators training future technical communicators in undergraduate and graduate environments will find this book useful given all the connections to prompting, assignments, and engagement as well as course redesign and academic policies. For those not working in education but who are still new to AI, “Section 1: Thinking with AI,” is one of the best available. Supporting that are multiple, practical examples and discussions of prompt creation, specificity, and iteration. Finally, “Part III: Learning with AI” is useful. Examples about gaining feedback and roleplaying with AI (Chapter 9) as well as Writing and AI (Chapter 11) provide important perspectives, questions, and practices. These two chapters appear particularly useful for independent contractors or new practitioners seeking to improve their own work through practice and simulation. Given the Teaching with AI’s price, it seems easy to justify the purchase even if the reader only plans to skim parts of the book and excerpt or focus on a few key chapters.
The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook, Expanded Edition
Siri Carpenter, ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2024. 368 pages, including index.
Index Terms—craft articles, interview techniques, reporting tips, science writing
Reviewed by Bonnie Denmark, Professor, Western Connecticut State University.
The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook, Expanded Edition, is a curated collection of craft articles for established and aspiring science journalists. Editor Siri Carpenter has put together a well-balanced compilation that offers practical advice from experienced science writers.
She divided the book into five fundamental areas of science writing: “Who Is a Science Journalist and How Do You Become One?” “What Makes a Science Story and How Do You Find One?” “How Do You Report a Science Story?” “How Do You Tell Your Story?” and “How Do You Build Expertise in Science Writing?” Each part comprises eight to nine articles with tips on finding and vetting sources, conducting interviews, writing beginnings and endings, making a pitch, reading primary sources, avoiding pitfalls, and other pertinent topics, all toward the goal of reporting on science clearly, engagingly, and accurately—and getting published.
In this corner of journalism, there is a dearth of specialized training. The Open Notebook comes to the rescue, and not only with this book. Readers can find all the essays and interviews in the book among the vast archives on The Open Notebook website (theopennotebook.com), established as a nonprofit in 2010 to provide skill-building resources and opportunities for science writers to connect with a world of colleagues.
The Craft of Science Writing is an excellent craft book written by a diverse community of writers for a diverse community of readers. I used the 2020 edition with my university science writing students and look forward to using this updated edition in the classroom. The expanded edition includes all the original content plus nine additional essays to further help writers present science in the most accessible and accurate way. The new articles round out the collection with guidance on working with sensitivity readers, eradicating ableist language, critically evaluating claims, tapping into social media for sources, and basing writing on data, among other subjects. Carpenter conveniently numbered the articles in this expanded edition, which is a small detail that makes the book easier to use in the classroom.
Visit theopennotebook.com for a comprehensive library of resources for science journalists. Meanwhile, this curated subset in one tidy volume serves as an ideal base text for those new to science journalism and provides expert tips even for seasoned professionals.
Icons: Poems
Jonathan Reeve Price. Albuquerque, NM: The Communication Circle. 2024. 126 pages.
Index Terms—AI in education, curriculum development, pedagogy, teaching with AI
Reviewed by Jeanette Evans
Thinking about how to evaluate communication through graphics can be of interest to those of us in the technical communication community as we can use and evaluate such means of communication in our own work. Jonathan Reeve Price explains in Icons: Poems how the elements of the computer icons we use today and when these graphical elements were created. They were part of what Apple used in their early graphical user interfaces. Price reflects on how these icons today have become part of our culture and everyday digital life.
The author takes each of 100 icons and has authored a poem about each one. We typically do not stop to think so deeply about icons. So, it is fun to see Price’s poetic take on each icon. He has a striking enlargement of each icon—one per page—with his poetic musing where he thinks about such things as name and function. Price’s musings can be funny, insightful, and thoughtful. The icons discussed in Icons: Poems are 100 of the 3,000 icons available from Google’s Material Design set. An example is 
In looking at each icon, Price asks questions such as whether the icon is beautiful. He also evaluates how effective the icon is in explaining what the shape is meant to express and even questions how humans connect with each other. In our own work, we can ask ourselves related questions about the graphical devices we are using. Such questions and musings can be fun and useful.
Anyone involved in communicating information graphically could benefit from reading Icons: Poems to gain insight into how to use, develop, and evaluate a graphical element. The poetry in this book lets us think more deeply about how human beings want to and can communicate and connect. The poetry made me think of the expression—a picture is worth a thousand words—as I thought about how an image or icon can express more than a verbal description alone. Icons: Poems also made me think about the icons in a church and how through these icons, humans try to “persuade that spiritual being to act on our behalf” (p. 15). I asked myself if the people who picked the word “icon” to depict elements in a graphical user interface were right in picking that word. I suppose it was not a bad choice as I could not produce anything better.It was especially notable to me that Price is an STC Fellow with a fabulously interesting background. “He quit the art world to join Apple Computer in 1982, where the introduction of MacPaint was a life-changing event for him. He created a style guide used for many years by technical communicators—How to Write an Apple Manual, later published in several editions under the title, How to Communicate Technical Information,” as explained at the https://www.jonathanreeveprice.com/ site which also notes how Price “has taught information architecture, technical writing, content development, and databases at New York University, Rutgers, New Mexico Tech, and as an adjunct professor, through the University of New Mexico, as well as online through the University of California, Santa Cruz.” Wow! Wow! Wow!