Name: The art of scientific writing
ISBN: 9780895734952

The art of scientific writing

"This new edition has been completely revised to reflect dramatic changes in communication over the past 15 years. The primary emphasis is on writing techniques, accurate expression, adherence to accepted standards, and above all clarity, but the authors also venture into communication technology and organizational as well as ethical aspects of science."--Jacket.

What Hacker News says

tethaOct 2026

And even with a mutual agreement - default LLM output tends to be very hard and inefficient to read. We've spent quite a bit of time at work to setup a few writing skills for Claude.

For example, mine is a technical writing skill based on the old book "The Art of Scientific Writing": Front load information as much as possible - the first paragraph of a document should be a summary, the first sentence of a paragraph should summarize. Short sentences building on each other. Always show evidence.

Someone else spent quite a while optimizing a standardized PR description template, with a section for intent, expected changes, risk, rollout coordination and such.

That made the slop a lot more tolerable.

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mindcrimeAug 2015

Stephen King said something like "To become a better writer, write a lot and read a lot". Here's a couple of articles that discuss that idea more:

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/dreamgates/2011/06/read-...

http://writetodone.com/how-to-use-reading-to-become-a-better...

Beyond that, there are, of course, tons of books for writers, including some specifically for tech writers. A lot of what you'll find on the shelf at, say, Barnes & Noble is about fiction writing, but then again, to some extent you could say that good writing is good writing regardless of whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I don't claim to be a great writer, but I can share a few titles from my own bookshelf on writing:

1. The Elements of Style - Strunk & White

2. On Writing Well - William Zinsser

3. NLP For Writers - Bekki Hill

4. A Certain 'Je Ne Sais Quoi' - Chloe Rhodes

5. A Manual For Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations - Kate L. Turabian

6. The Elements of Technical Writing - Gary Blake & Robert W. Bly

7. The Art of Scientific Writing - Ebel, Bliefert, Russey

8. Writers Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing - Michelle Rubert (ed.)

9. On Writing - Stephen King

10. Zen In The Art of Writing - Ray Bradbury

11. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss

12. Where Do You Get Your Ideas - Fred White

13. The Complete Guide to Article Writing - Naveed Saleh

14. HBR Guide To Better Business Writing - Bryan A. Garner

15. Make A Scene - Jordan E. Rosenfeld

16. Beginnings, Middles, & Ends - Nancy Kress

I'm also a big believer in having a strong vocabulary, even though I don't try to write in a pretentious, sesquipedalian fashion very often. But sometimes it helps to have that "just right" word available. To that end, I recommend:

17. Big Words You Should Know - David Olsen, Michelle Bevilacqua and Justin Cord Hayes

18. The Words You Should Know To Sound Smart - Robert W. Bly

19. The Dictionary of Difficult Words - John Ayto

20. Rogets Thesaurus of Words For Intellectuals - David Olsen, Michelle Bevilacqua, and Justin Cord Hayes

21. The Thinker's Thesaurus - Peter E. Meltzer

22. Fiske Word Power - Fiske, Mallison, Mandell

23. The Well Spoken Thesaurus - Tom Heehler

24. They Have A Word For It - Howard Rheingold

and remember, as Aldous Huxley said "The proper study of mankind is books". And on that note, may I recommend keeping a couple of books of quotations around. A good quote can be quite useful.

25. Mark My Words - Great Quotations and the Stories Behind Them - Nigel Rees

26. The Giant Book of American Quotations - Carruth & Ehrlich

as for websites and blogs and what-not, there is a technical writing subreddit:

http://technicalwriting.reddit.com

and https://writing.reddit.com

and

https://writinghub.reddit.com

You also can't go wrong studying the essays of George Orwell

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/index_en

And I think that's about all I have to contribute, except to reiterate "write a lot, read a lot".

Source: I have no particular distinction as a writer, but I have managed to get a few articles published at InfoWorld: http://www.infoworld.com/author/Phil-Rhodes/ and I've written quite a few blog posts for my full-time employer, like: http://mammothdata.com/big-data-open-source-risk-managment/ and I have written most of the content on the Fogbeam company blog: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com I like to think that if I keep reading and writing, I might actually acquire some skill at it some day.

HTH, YMMV, IANAL, WTFBBQ, ETC.

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