Ask HN: Non-technical books for technical people? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Non-technical books for technical people?

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What non-technical books would you recommend to technical folks to improve their writing skills?

Edit: by "writing skills" I meant general writing skills and not just technical writing.

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I was an editor before getting into tech, and these are the books that still hold up 20 years later:

Readable and fun, but extremely useful:

• Lapsing into a Comma, Bill Walsh (RIP)

• The 10% Solution, Ken Rand (for editing down wordy text)

• Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale

• Woe Is I, Patricia T. O'Conner

More resource-like and grammar-heavy:

• Words Into Type, Marjorie E. Skillin (hard-core grammar rules, great section on redundancies)

• Chicago Manual of Style (in general, the core style of book and magazine writing)

• Associated Press Stylebook (in general, the core style of newspaper writing)

• Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan A. Garner

• Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage

• Dictionary of American Idioms, Maxine Tull Makkai

Not about writing, but hilarious and snobby and awesome -- great airplane reading:

• The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster

Thank you! Any books you’d recommend specifically for non-technical (narrative) writing?

You are welcome! None of the books I listed are for technical writing. I'm not completely sure if by "narrative" you mean fiction...? But these are decidedly not fiction/creative-writing resources.

What type of writing are you looking to optimize?

thank you! I meant fiction, yes.

Optimizing the "flow" of fiction, especially around some stylistic norms that are not neccessarily intuitive - for example not using words more complex than "said / replied / answered" in dialogues ("Wow," he said VS "Wow," he noted) as that makes understanding dialogue harder to process.

Or the rules around using / not using passive voice, also when is it better to use the synonyms VS the most common word.

Tim Clare is a novelist and also writes about writing. He also happens to be very funny. I recommend his podcast Death of 1000 Cuts where he gives writing advice and sometimes reads and critiques the first 250 words of contributors' novels. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/death-of-1000-cuts/id1...

Edit: One of the things he does really well is explaining the nuts and bolts "rules" of writing, like the Primacy/recency effect, the importance of what he calls "crunchy specificity", and lots of other stuff that will stay with you and help you make stylistic decisions in many different contexts.

1. On Writing Well by William Zinsser

2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

3. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White

4. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

5. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

6. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

7. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

8. The Art of Plain Talk by Rudolf Flesch

9. A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker

10. Writing Science by Joshua Schimel

+1 for The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. That book is a joy to read.

I'd argue that writing is less about syntax or grammar and more about storytelling (whether technical or nontechnical, fiction or nonfiction). You're conveying an idea or mental image to a reader, who then has to interpret and filter it through their own experiences and imagination in order to give it meaning. That requires a high degree of empathy on your part, a combination of your own lived experiences and imagination, to be able to estimate how your reader is likely to read and respond to a sentence or paragraph.

If you get every punctuation mark right but don't have a single worthwhile thing to say, nobody is going to care that you're technically proficient. Nobody will even notice; they'll just move on to a less boring text. On the other hand, you can tell a perfectly good story even with a ton of misspelled words and malformed sentences. For example, the old novel Flowers for Algernon has large parts written in that style.

To that end, I don't think reading a bunch of technical manuals on "proper" English is anywhere near as helpful as just reading a lot of good books (browse bestseller lists, or classic literature, or Goodreads lists, and find a genre that appeals to you or a writer whose prose you enjoy). Then, to further your own writing, you just HAVE to keep writing and writing and writing AND get feedback. Take a writer's workshop course (medium or larger towns usually have a bunch; check your local newspaper or bookstore corkboard), or take a creative writing course at a local community college. No amount of self-study beats having twenty other people from various backgrounds give you feedback on your writing, specifically. It is horrifying to be so vulnerable, but it's the only way you'll know how your work resonates (or not).

Technical writing benefits from Practical Style (the reader's time is important, the reader wants to get a job done, easy parsing of sentences is important), so I'd recommend:

Joseph M. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

An old edition is fine. There are many editions with slightly differing titles (Toward Clarity and Grace, The Basics of Clarity and Grace), all of them are fine. Get the cheapest or fastest to deliver or whatever. Don't think about which one to get.

I gotta say, the best way to write better, is to just write and take feedback from other people.

I completely agree that the best way for a person to improve their writing is to write more. But, I think reading voraciously also helps, particularly good writing. The reading and writing are complementary — you imbibe some good writing and then assimilate aspects of it into your own writing. As you keep reading - assuming you are also writing - you gain exposure to a more diverse range of styles, prose, and techniques which prevents your writing from becoming stale or robotic and predictable.

I agree. Though you need to be more focused on the writing instead of just enjoying the book.

This is mostly practice question. But from my own exp (few years tech writing), writing skills easy to get, but need marketing and feedback skills (ask your mother), to write what interest people.

It's not clear if the writing you want to improve is technical or not. Good technical writing often requires more planning and organisation than style.

Check out this free resource: https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_handbook-for-writers/

Broad general reading can expose you to good writing and help you improve your own writing.

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