Technical Communication

In the past four years, I've had to read many books I didn't exactly enjoy, either because they were long-winded (Morris' Structures and Properties of Materials), poorly written (Popov's Mechanics), or just uninteresting (History of Modern Southeast Asia). But for the first time, I am reading a book that is actually offensive.

The book, Technical Communication by Mike Markel, explains how to effectively write and speak when preparing reports, giving instructions, or addressing superiors in technical environment. It first makes a great point of listing eight "Measures of Excellence" (like clarity, conciseness, comprehensiveness, etc.) that are essential for technical communication. However, starting with the second chapter, the book nosedives. One of the eight measures it lists is gearing your writing to the correct audience- making sure the language is formal/informal and advanced/basic as you expect your readers to be. Markel completely ignores his own point as he devotes entire sections to teaching college engineers how to "Use E-mail to Send Files." At first I figured this must be an old textbook, written when "e-mail" was first introduced. But it's copyrighted 2007. The entire text not only over explains the most fundamental concepts, but targets it to a fifth-grade reading level. Ironically enough, Markel mentions that if your language isn't appropriate to the audience's level, they may not trust your content and be compelled to follow its instructions as well.

To make matters worse, the chapter on working in groups- which is actually necessary for many engineers- opens with "Participating in a meeting involves listening and speaking...Listening is more than just hearing..." and continues at this level, insulting the intelligence of its readers sentence by sentence.

Ugh.