The Elements Of International English Style: A Guide To Writing Correspondence, Reports, Technical Documents, And Internet Pages For A Global Audience

As a professional writer whose audience is primarily ESL speakers, I was surprised to find I still had a lot to learn. This book taught me some new tricks. It should be required reading for anyone who writes for an ESL audience. It's easy to read, well-organized, and full of practical examples.

I think Dr. Weiss's new book, "The Elements of International English Style" should be compulsory reading for anyone who creates documentation, with the possible exception of literary works. He rightly places the responsibility of the legibility of a document on the writer, rather than the reader who should be concentrating on the ideas or processes discussed, without having to struggle with the medium. Well done!

Nurel Beylerian Ph.D., PE

With the publication of The Elements of International English Style, Dr. Edmond Weiss has provided writers a "Strunk and White" for the 21st Century and the Internet. He does this through a stimulating presentation of coherent principles -- simplicity, clarity, correspondence, cultural adaptation; through rules of usage presented as 57 tactics for writers; and through numerous helpful examples and illustrations. Writers of English in a global environment have a wise and valuable guide and resource in Dr. Weiss and his book.

For about 10 years, I have given every new employee of my engineering firm a copy of Edmond Weiss's 100 Writing Remedies. I came across International English when I was ordering new copies and now I'm going to give this one to new employees also. There's something that business and technical people need to know on every page. And I had a shock of recognition when he explained why "yes" doesn't always mean "yes" in negotiations with "high context" suppliers. I hope the business schools will make this book required reading.

As a translator and writer who often produces English documents for readers who are not native speakers of English, I have long wrestled with the problem of how to adapt my English writing style so that it is understandable to the widest possible audience. This book offers many useful ideas and pointers for people like me: avoid ambiguous and culturally-bound expressions, anticipate how individual words will be translated by readers into their native languages, avoid sarcasm and humor, and much more. I thus recommend this book strongly.

I wish, though, that it had been more carefully edited. In my first few minutes of skimming through it, I came upon several embarrassing errors: "The shorter Oxford English Dictionary has 25,000 entries" (p. 17) should be "The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has [some much larger number of] entries"; references to "German-English" and "Hebrew-English" dictionaries (pp. 21-22) should be to "English-German" and "English-Hebrew" dictionaries; the example sentence "an investigate trail is cold" (p. 23) must be a typo (of "an investigation trail is cold"?); examples of hyphenation usage (p. 74) are unclear because the examples appear at the ends of lines; and an example text that is described as being in a mono-spaced font (p. 82) is in fact in a proportional font. Such mistakes distract from the book's overall worth.