business skills

This book is just what is advertised, how to write better policies and procedures. It advocates the use of a writing format that makes for easy-to-read policies and procedures, a format that I know from conferences is used worldwide by many companies. This book is for procedure writers, not technical writers. And this book is not high-level, it is very detailed to the extent that my company has bought more than 25 of these books to hand out to each person who writes policies and procedures. While the book is very simple, it is still by far the best book I have read on the subject. I find the competition too convulted and they don't stay on the point. Not so with this author's books.

Jay

This book is fine if you are looking for a guide to create a Policy & Procedure manual where the procedures are at a high level. You should, however, look elsewhere if you are looking for a guide on how to write clear, easy-to-use procedures. The format for the procedures in this book is similar to the technical writing style of 20 years ago and is not suitable for procedures that will actually have to be followed by the end-user. You should look to Nancy J. Campbell's "Writing Effective Policies and Procedures," Blake & Bly's "The Elements of Technical Writing," or an Information Mapping seminar if you are interested in creating "user-friendly" procedures.

I was pleasantly suprised how helpful this book was. Steve demonstrates how to write a procedure so it will be understood by those who use it. His book certainly showed me many of the flaws in my procedure writing. The examples of "what not to do" point out styles that are inappropriate for procedures.

Steve also explains how to format a procedure for ease of use.