Posts Tagged "Book Reviews"

How Character Drives Story — Book Review: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, published in 2011, is a story about a pharmaceutical researcher’s attempt to make sense of her lost colleague, presumably dead in the Amazon, while wrestling with a domineering academic professor who refuses to communicate updates about her research. The book begins at a slow pace but, as Janet Maslin notes (Read more...)

How Character Drives Story — Book Review: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, published in 2011, is a story about a pharmaceutical researcher’s attempt to make sense of her lost colleague, presumably dead in the Amazon, while wrestling with a domineering academic professor who refuses to communicate updates about her research. The book begins at a slow pace but, as Janet Maslin notes (Read more...)

Book Review: Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson, is a fantasy trilogy that takes you into a world where the characters can “burn” metals inside their bodies to give rise to certain powers, such as increased strength, the ability to push and pull other metals, an enhancement of the senses, or the most potent of all, the ability to (Read more...)

Using Tags to Increase Findability

I recently read Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (2008), by Gene Smith. Smith dives into tagging as a method for adding metadata to resources, which in turn increases the organization and findability of the resources. Traditional help authoring tools categorize resources through folders (a carryover from Windows folders), whereas web platforms typically use tags. Tags (Read more...)

Book Review: The Hunger Games, and a Possible Parallel for Technical Writers

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is one of the most suspenseful page-turners I’ve read in a while. I actually listened to it via Audible, and I was so pulled into the story that I found myself doing dishes, cleaning up, driving slowly — anything so that I could prolong listening to the book. A (Read more...)

My Review of the New Testament

Last year I wrote a review of the Old Testament. It was an off-topic post that I almost regretted posting, except that I did get a few comments from readers who appreciated my side jog because it showed I think about more than technical writing. This year I’ve been reading the New Testament, which is (Read more...)