of writing: the use of abbreviations, the division of compound words, some rules for spelling properly, among other things.This comprehensive book is aimed at students of technical writing and of English in two-year colleges.It is devised as a typical textbook: The margins are wide enough for notes, the terms likely to be new to students are printed in expanded boldface type and their meaning in light italics.Also printed in light italics are points the author thinks worth emphasizng.The book is easy to read: physically because the print is on non-glare paper, conceptually because it is well written and well organized, and that, after all, is the acid test of the quality of a book on composition.Superficially, nothing about the book suggests that it is a book on technical writing.One sees no charts, no graphs, no exploded views, no instructions on how to write an abstract.And yet this book is ideally suited for learning about or teach ing technical writing because technical writing, to attain its objective, must reflect the precision and discipline of thought basic to science and technology.That is the topic of this book.The manners and conventions of presentation, namely, that in technical writing one would use a table to compare or contrast pieces of apparatus of different make or vintage, that one would use a step-action chart or a flowchart to describe a process-all this, though important for the efficient transfer of information, is nevertheless somewhat peripheral to the meaning of technical writing.Students who learn about composition from