Readability of professional technical material was assessed by scientists and engineers. Less than 33 percent proved `easy' to read and understand. Further investigation showed that sentence structure had the greatest effect on readability.

The author's preface states that A Communicative Grammar of English is intended primarily for the “advanced overseas student” who has learned English as a second language, but many professional communicators who speak English as a first language may also find this book useful.

Reading of a substantial number of recent technical publications discloses excessive violations of certain stylistic and grammatical proprieties. These violations suggest failure of editors and teachers to get their message across and of writers to approach writing with fitting concern. The most frequent and significant violations are selected and explained. Speculation on causes and suggestions for elimination of the violations accompany the explanations.

Soundspel is a phonetic spelling system based on the transliteration of 44,000 most-used English words. It uses letters and letter-pairs consistently to represent the sounds in those words. A computer programmed with both the traditional and the “logical” spellings can provide Soundspel output in numerous stages of conversion from traditional English input.

Knowing how to express oneself properly is a necessity in today's technical world. The technical writer must use correct grammar and exact language in his descriptions of precise, technical subjects. He must learn how to adapt his personal style to the impact he wants to make. In addition, he must learn how to communicate to various levels of audiences. Also, he should learn to use graphic aids in the presentation of an article.

Much of punctuation is arbitrary, except for the period and question mark. However, there are sound rules worth mastering, for the use of punctuation to make things clearer or reading easier. Included here from the author's book The Careful Writer are commentary on use of the apostrophe, colon, comma, dash, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation marks, and semicolon.

`Why Johnny can't write?' (Newsweek, December 5, 1975) is answered by a Technical Johnny, whose rebuttal shows that he needs help rather than censure. Suggestions for improving such poorly literate writing are addressed to engineers, technicians, professional communicators, and engineering managers.

Standardization in typography, spelling, abbreviations, and citations provides a semblance of uniformity to a journal. Standardization guarantees greater flexibility in the use of copyeditors in an office that publishes several journals. However, journals in different disciplines lend themselves to different formats and styles: a large journal with many articles is more efficiently set in double-column pages of small type, while a journal containing many equations requires a single-column page with generous size type and citation of references in the text by author and date instead of by number. Such deviations from routine standardization keep copyeditors alert. Perhaps the most important area of standardization in a redactory office is in the procedures of checking galley and page proof. There can be no deviation from standard rules of proofreading. Finally, economics in publishing may dictate standardization in the future. Authors may some day be “compositors” when their typescript becomes the camera-ready copy. More standardization, not less, in the original typescript will then be required.

ANMC (American National Metric Council), has spent considerable effort and some funds in trying to establish consistent spelling for the basic measures of length (meter/metre) and volume (liter/litre). Here is a set of arguments that was prepared by a task force of ANMC to indicate the reasoning on both sides of the question.