The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing

The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing offers the ideal combination of comprehensive coverage, accessibility, and convenience. It supplies grammatical and stylistic information, provides the key format elements of common technical documents along with illustrative examples, guides authors in the effective use of visual information, and helps writers revise and edit their own work as well as review that of others. The Mayfield Electronic Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, which is platform-independent and can interact with several applications at once, can be used alone or accompanied by the printed version. Table of contents 1. PLANNING AND PRODUCING DOCUMENTS Characteristics of effective technical communication / Document purpose / Problem statement / Audience / Organization / Forecasting / Drafting a technical document / Revising for organization / Revising for content / Editing for grammar and style / Reviewing a document / Collaborative writing / Legal and ethical issues / Document design / Document checklist / 2. DOCUMENT TYPES / Memoranda / Meeting documents Literature review / Reports / Letters / Acceptance letters / Proposals / Press releases / Task oriented / Thesis / Oral reports / Electronic documents / Resumes / Notes and notebooks / 3. ELEMENTS OF TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS Sections and subsections / Headings and subheadings / Front matter / Body / Back matter / 4. GRAPHS AND FIGURES Reasons for using graphics / Common graphics / General guidelines for graphics / 5. PARAGRAPHS Paragraph unity / Paragraph development 6. SENTENCES Avoiding stacked modifiers / Avoiding wordiness / Overloaded sentences / Sentence fragments / Comma splice / Fused sentences / Run-on sentences / Agreement / Lack of parallelism / Choppy sentences / Misplaced modifiers / Dangling modifiers / Double negatives / Faulty comparisons / Inappropriate shifts / Sequence of tenses / 7. WORDS Abstract and general language / Vague language / Ornate language / Technical terms / Biased language / 8. PUNCTUATION Periods / Commas / Colon / Semicolon / Question marks / Exclamation points / Apostrophe / Quotation marks / Hyphens / Dashes / Parentheses / Brackets / 9. MECHANICS Capitalization / Italics / Abbreviations / Acronyms / Numbers / Enumerating / Symbols / Equations / Spelling / 10. DOCUMENTATION General principles / Using and citing sources and avoiding plagiarism / Specific styles-sample references / American Psychological Association / Chicago Manual of Style / Council of Biology Editors Style / Modern Languages Association / Committee on Engineering Society Editors / 11. PARTS OF SPEECH Nouns / Pronouns / Verbs / Adjectives / Participial adjectives / Adverbs / Prepositions / Conjunctions / Articles / 12. PARTS OF SENTENCES Subjects / Predicates / Objects / Modifiers / Phrases / Clauses / Dependent clauses / 13. SENTENCE TYPES AND WORD ORDER Sentence types / Basic clause types / Word order / Ordering of phrases and clauses / 14. USAGE GLOSSARY (Chapter 14 is an alphabetically organized reference handbook of grammatical rules, conventions, and other important topics for writers.) 15. WRITER’S RESOURCES Style guides Dictionaries Informational resources Library card catalogues INDEX