Among the many text-books, guide-books, case-books, and hand-books now available on technical writing, three small and unpretentious volumes deserve particular attention. All three are instructive, persuasive, and pleasant. One is an old friend, long known as the little book; the other two, very much younger, are works of high quality also:

In scientific and technical communication, intelligibility is primarily a cultural problem, to which carefully formulated generalizations, rather than streams of data, are the only solution. Preoccupation with simplicity, or clarity, or `correctness' is a poor substitute for a careful consideration of what the reader can and cannot be expected to understand. The writer who will overcome his prejudices against generalization in order to convey the concepts which his reader does not share with him should be able to communicate more effectively at three levels: (1) to his fellow specialists, (2) to specialists in other fields, and (3) to concerned laymen.

Papers and correspondence may be submitted on any topic relating to technical communication.Topics may range from the preparation of reports and papers for publication to oral presentations, graphic displays, conduct of meetings, communications m f iji<* £r;*r>hic ftrtv publications production, management, information retrieval, and communication psychology.Treatment may be tutorial, documentai, review, descriptive, or theoretical.Papers may be directed primarily to

This paper presents a general view of communication, and urges those who write on technical subjects to follow the `rules' in existing books of instruction. Expediency and custom are the basis of these most acceptable ways for presenting written and spoken messages of many kinds. Such suggestions can be very helpful for writers who want to communicate technical matters successfully. By following the recommendations given in guides like the seven listed in this paper, the author of a technical article is likely to please those who think form and correctness are important, to impress those who think nothing is important, and to be understood by all.

Technical writing means many things to many people. The instructive literature for the field generally either emphasizes that portion of the field conforming to the author's interpretation or attempts to cover the entire field with general concepts and admonitions. Rarely does a book appear that covers as much, as clearly, and in as practical a manner as Technically — Write! by R. S. Blicq. Mr. Blicq is Head of the Industrial and Technology Communication Department at Red River Community College, in Winnepeg, Canada. He obviously has had extensive experience teaching technical communications and, in this text book, he speaks familiarly at the undergraduate level. More than this, his presentation holds a warmth and intimacy that is uncharacteristic of instructional literature: the professor is speaking to you in his classroom. Although the physical scientist and even the graduate engineer may tend to view the style as being below his level of sophistication, Mr. Blicq has packed almost every principle of clear technical exposition on the widest variety of communications in this 380-odd page book, along with “problems” in the form of work assignments at the end of each chapter. Even for the professional communicator, this book holds much of value as a reference when he is faced with an assignment in a portion of the field outside of his specialty.

When engineers and scientists think about communicating technical information to others, they seldom think about the psychology involved in the transfer of that information. They reason that if the subject is technical, the conclusions reached by the scientific method, and the technical language accurate, then there can be no lack of communication. But they are misunderstood: conclusions are misinterpreted, data is misused, and language is incomprehensible. How can the communication fail when they work only with the truth of data obtained in a research laboratory? Communication, like engineering and science, is both a craft and an art It is the disciplined exercise of the mind and an intuitive sense of proportion. It is requires the objectivity of a detached view of the subject matter and the subjectivity of an involvement with the design of the final product.

Psychophysics, in this paper, is used in its literal sense: the effect of physical processes upon the mental processes of an organism. Recent studies show that temperature fluctuations of the human body have a 24-hour periodicity that is reflected in the activity of organs and functions of the body, awake and asleep. The rise and fall of such activity is phased differently for different Individuals. It may become necessary to determine the most receptive and responsive time for each individual to engage in communicating, as well as other significant activities.

JPVJR Group's Conference on the Psychology of Technical Communications, held in Philadelphia this past February, served to dramatically display the widening scope of professional communications.Just as the many disciplines of science and engineering are merging to an extent where boundaries are obscured, so have the subdivisions of communications overlapped to a point where distinctions become very difficult.John Phillips, now our President, organized the Conference into its three major sessions: Communications among Engineers and Scientists.Communications to Engineers and Scientists, and Communications from Engineers and Scientists.The list of speakers included, in addition to professional communicators who specialize in the support and education of t(*rYin\rci\ nprcnnnp] workers in the field nf sociology, nsv-

THE EXISTENCE and makeup of this group seems to challenge a statement made recently by Derek de Solla Price. As many of you may know, Derek Price is Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale, and he has done considerable work in the how and why of scientific communication, especially as regards the literature. After a preliminary analysis of the use of scientific and technical journals, Price concluded that scientists write but don't read, while engineers read but don't write. That's an oversimplification, no doubt, but I suspect there may be more than a mere grain of truth in it. If there is, I'm obviously left with the problem of determining what an IEEE “Group on Professional Communication” is all about. One way of doing that was to try and discover what engineering journals are all about Setting out to do that, I realized that I'd have to first come to some acceptable definition of “engineer.” That's where I got stuck. Perhaps my difficulty with that definition has its roots in some of the same problems which suggested to the IEEE that a two-day conference on the “Psychology of Technical Communications” might be a good and useful thing.