“I know I read something on that some place.” We all know the situation. A colleague invites our comments on a topic in which we have some interest. We rummage our memories for a clue to what we've read or where we've read it. Finding no help there, we search our files. Alas! We have either not filed it or misfiled it. “One of these days,” we promise ourselves, “I'm going to organize the information I pick up.”

A wealth of examples and assignment suggestions alone makes Joanna Freeman's Basic Technical and Business Writing invaluable to teachers and students of technical communication. Chapter 3, “Headings, Tables, and Figures,” includes 41 illustrations, most of them courtesy of business organizations. So impressive and useful is this array that one tends to overlook the misplaced apostrophe in one of the charts. Dr. Freeman complements even her discussion of formal reports with three full-length examples, each demonstrating a different communication problem and solution: a statistical study from the Journal of Marketing Research, a persuasive argument from the 25th International Technical Communication Conference Proceedings, and a student paper classifying and summarizing the results of research.