Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style

By Sujata Srinath

After nearly a decade, editor Philip Rubens has come out with this second edition of his specialized manual of style for science and technical writers. And the decade has been one that saw computers and the Internet take communication technology to dizzying heights. General manuals of style may tend to be cumbersome and very often, the need for examples relevant to topics is keenly felt.

As the title suggests, this manual of style is targeted specifically at writers, editors, and information designers who deal with technical or scientific content. It is a delight to read examples of familiar technical phrases and sentences, or look up scientific notations and measurements, and realize how these are to be used.

Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of  Style, 2nd Edition By Philip Rubens Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001   Paperback: 427 pages   Price: US$25

I particularly liked the use of punctuation marks in bulleted lists. Only a sound grounding in grammar allows one to use semicolons for some lists and commas for others and I have always found bulleted lists without a period at the end incomplete—a kind of unfinished paragraph.

If you ever wondered whether words like pre-emptive, multitasking or random-access must be used with or without a hyphen, you will find a reasoning in this manual that will help you to set a style for such content that will be both convincing and logical.

The manner in which this book is structured, written and presented is a splendid example of what is described and prescribed in the book! The information layout has just enough white space to avoid cluttering and each page is easy on the eye. Every paragraph discusses a single train of thought and each paragraph is never more than 3-4 sentences long. The language used is crisp and clear leaving the reader with no doubt on what the paragraph intended to convey.

Locating information is easy. Although a few of us may attempt to read the book linearly, the book is ideally a reference type of document and designed as such. The table of contents is a pleasure to view and provides direct links to the topics and sub-topics. The headers and footers are descriptive and aid in easy location of topics. Utmost care has been taken to ensure that an overview of each chapter is presented at the beginning and the content flow is flawless.

Although this book is based on the exhaustive Chicago Manual of Style, it is targeted at a specific audience and therefore deviates from that venerable book in many ways. Chapter 6 on Incorporating Specialized Terminology contains sections on how to use abbreviations as professional shorthand, how to use organization names, military terminology, health and medical terms, scientific terms and symbols, and technology terms. Chapter 7 on Using Numbers and Symbols is more usable than its counterpart in the Chicago Manual of Style. Comparisons are odious; however, it is useful to know the limitations of one style guide over the other so that we benefit from the knowledge. I would view the Chicago Manual of Style as an older superset manual, with the Science and Technical Writing Manual as its very specialized, detailed offshoot.

This book definitely deserves a place on every technical or science writers’ table. As a ready reckoner for a wide range of topics-- from audience analysis to index generation or from punctuation to using non-textual information-- this book covers it all.

(By Sujata Srinath, Sr. Technical Writer, ZiLOG India Electronics Pvt. Ltd.)