Books on writing technical English are quite common, and some of them are useful. However, they are not usually the sort of books to be read for entertainment or for which description "witty and amusing" springs to mind.



Robert Schoenfeld's book is the exception to all this. It has a great deal of perfectly serious things to say, and its advice is generally excellent, but it manages to be effortlessly humorous at the same time. Probably in reality it wasn't effortless at all, but it just reads that way, like the best journalism. Schoenfeld was for many years the editor of the Australian Journal of Chemistry, and most of his book appeared originally as articles in Chemistry in Australia, so he was a sort of journalist, but was clearly a chemist first.



You might doubt that it would be possible to be witty and entertaining about a subject apparently as dry as quantity calculus -- basically, whether you should label the axis of your graph with x (cm), as Schoenfeld and I would prefer, or with x/cm, as many of the leaders in chemical thermodynamics insist with a passion that might seem hard to credit -- but you would be wrong. Even though I have now read the two chapters on this subject many times, I can still read them one more time just for the amusement -- and really, the whole book is like that: Schoenberg manages to find amusing things to say about such uninviting topics as the balancing of parentheses and the use of mathematical symbols in English sentences.



The main (and trivial) complaint that I have about this book is that it is written primarily for chemists, and I would like to have a book that was directed more towards biochemists. I have sometimes thought of stealing Schoenfeld's idea and writing one myself, but unfortunately I'm not witty enough.

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