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Bugs in Writing by Lyn Dupre Highly Recommended

ISBN: 0-201-60019-6       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 645       Price: £16-95

Categories:   writing solid code     documentation

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 8-4 (May 1996)

She defines her readership as all the people who might plausibly be found wandering around the section of a bookstore that has shelves of computer related books. I hope that those same bookstores have the sense to place her book in that vicinity and not in some remote section concerned with writing English. If you are part of her target readership, you might ask what writing has to do with you as you have no intention of becoming an author. The chances are that you are wrong, you almost certainly have to write as part of your work, even if it is only a problem specification or a job report.

Lyn shares my abhorrence for the dry, almost unreadable, academic style espoused by so many technical writers as well as academics. The art of writing is to say what we mean clearly so that you can share our understanding.

Lyn has written the book as 150 articles. They vary in length from a couple of pages to eight or ten. Every article is readable by itself and makes no assumptions about which other you have already studied. Lyn suggests that you should read just a few at a time, digest them and then move on. I will (I think that better conveys my meaning than 'shall' - she has an article on the subject) be reading this book in bits during the next year as well as looking up specific points while writing (when I have the time to do so).

This book is almost essential reading for those who wish to learn to improve their writing, technical or otherwise. I think Addison-Wesley should send a free copy to all whose book proposals they accept. Their competitors could do a lot worse than follow suit. I would also hope to see it on the reading lists for Computer Science courses.

By the way, the BUGS of the title is an acronym for Bad, Ugly, Good, Splendid.