Roy Poe redefines the “business report” not only to focus on those research reports of traditional business-report writing texts but also to concentrate on “shorter, day-to-day communications.” As Poe explains, most business writers misunderstand their own writing. “Just about every written communication is a report. It might be as simple as a while-you-were-out telephone message or as complex as a 200-page analysis of marketing strategy,” he begins. As he continues to investigate the problems business writers face, he dismisses the discrete categories so popular with most texts: progress reports, information reports, analytical reports, investigative reports, research reports. These, he claims, may all be parts of the same report. As Poe summarizes, “Any time you transmit facts, opinions, proposals, or recommendations, you are reporting.” Beginning with this concept of all written work as “reporting,” Poe tackles the questions any writer must answer before writing successfully.

In A Guide for Writing Better Technical Papers, Craig Harkins and Daniel Plung show admirable concern with all aspects of the writing process through their editorial comments and their selection of articles. Unfortunately for the less dedicated writer, the text mixes theory and practice unevenly. And the editors' concern with publication detracts somewhat from the importance of day-to-day writing tasks of the technical writer-communication tasks as important as the finished technical article. Let us consider each of the five sections they include in the text: “Getting Started,” “The Rhetoric of Papers and Articles,” “Tricks of the Trade,” “Some Research Results,” and “Following Through.”