"How to Write" Without Actually Writing

Reviews the book, How to Write Effective Reports. According to the Instructor's Guide of How to Write Effective Reports, it is "an eight-chapter programed instruction course, written in the intrinsic format. It will enable an individual who has a high-school education, but neither formal training nor special aptitude in writing, to prepare reports successfully." This book reflects the view that regardless of content or audience a report should be clear, straightforward, and interesting It should be devoid of ornate style. The most noticeable weakness of the program is that obstacles are continually strewn in the path of the learner by program scrambling, item form, and trick questions. Regardless of programming weaknesses, the absence of validation data and answer key, this program offers advantages for the learner. It identifies relevant components of the report-writing task, and it provides some practice and some basis for response correction. With the exception of some answer pages and questions, the writing style itself provides a model worthy of imitation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)