Jay Reid Gould has had a formative influence on the development of technical and business communication in the twentieth century. In a career as student, teacher, consultant, and author and editor, including service as founding editor of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Jay has helped bridge the gap between technical subject matter and the human concern of communicating this subject matter. Thus he has helped synthesize the sciences and the humanities.

This compilation provides a comprehensive listing of all the known and available publications of Jay R. Gould including books, plays, short stories, articles, essays, papers. It also lists unpublished items such as papers and speeches, plays, and other items, including items about Jay Reid Gould.

A survey-experiment at the University of Leeds, England, attempted to resolve two questions: (1) Are some grammatical structures more efficient than others in communicating scientific fact? and (2) Do students pursuing different academic disciplines have correspondingly different value systems with regard to technical writing and technical subject matter? The results of the survey, which sampled 300 students, indicated yes to both questions. Particularly ironic was the finding that the third-person passive voice, so commonly the style of twentieth-century technical English, is disadvantageous from a communication standpoint.

Modern technical writing often suffers from its tendency toward jargon. Technical writing courses should include units on grammar as it relates to stylistics in technical writing. Transformational-generative grammar offers an effective and useful approach to train technical writers to communicate more effectively and to avoid the problems inherent in an impersonal style. One way of organizing a discussion of transformational-generative grammar is to consider its application to sentences and clauses, phrases, and individual words.