Message

Dear friend receive my sincere friendly greeting, I hope you are doing well.
I have read your book “TOO BIG TO KNOW”, I saw that you did great job. You know that I’m taking Technical Writing 101 courses. Therefore, I remark that you have followed many steps of modern Technical Writer of today, but you are still missing some important elements that I want to let you know.
My first remark is the critic on your book “TOO BIG TO KNOW” relatively to the “Technical Writing 101(TW101)” is very complexes, because your book is not about technical concept. However, Technical Writing 101 recommends that to write about any concept, a writer should possess the information as must as it’s possible. Also he/she should give the details that can make ease to be understand by the readers. I observed that you wrote about “Knowledge”, then, you didn’t provide must details about the definition of topic as TW 101 solicited. You didn’t give the definition concrete of the knowledge, and neither the point of divergence or convergence of all knowledge. For example, you should tell the difference between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. You believe that Knowledge is information. When I look at this sentence from your book, “For example, information becomes knowledge when you decide whether to wear a sweater.” This means not all information can be knowledge. Therefore, you also, should clearly define and distinct the knowledge from a simple information, because according to Technical Writing 101, a technical writer is really a translator, his mission is to explain a complex concept to someone who has no skill about it. Also, I remark that you didn’t use any visual communication, that can lucid some passages to readers as a technical writer should do.
In other hand, I could see that you have followed many steps of Technical Writing 101. You didn’t make any redundancy in your book and you have no confusion inside. TOO BIG TO KNOW is a book that is well organized the title and subtitle of text are clear and they are in the difference sizes that can help readers to understand the different topics that you want to explain. Technical Writing 101 tells us, a technical writer should give a lot of information to people that they need to use to understand the technology concept. When I consider this hypothesis, I can say that you provide a lot of information about Knowledge that is a principal topic of your book “TOO BIG TO KNOW”. I don’t know if you consulted your coworkers as Technical Writing 101 recommends but you have used many ideas from other celebrate people in the this book to reach your objective. For example you have mentioned what Harlan Cleverand did to its earliest known version, to establish the hierarchy between data, information, knowledge and wisdom in your subtitle “Triangular Knowledge”.

“Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
Then you have used the same idea wrote by T.S. Eliot “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” this time to explain that the Knowledge is not an actionable information and nether information of a mass of unrelated fact. Also you have used Skip Walter idea where he said “while information is structured data, knowledge “is actionable information.”” Despite you didn’t give exact definition of the knowledge, however, you have pointed out many information that could help readers to understand what knowledge is in the real sense.
You also, used many of facts to make your idea about knowledge understandable. Including “The way Enders’s team succeeded in growing the polio virus was to inject it into the brain of a monkey and see if it came down with the disease’s awful symptoms.” That Salk used then this chain of knowledge is still most up to date medical processes of the day, you said. You took former President Bill Clinton legacy of the welfare reform legislation and Darwin’s facts during which “Henry David Thoreau observed a bird he hadn’t seen before “flapping low with heavy wing.”” Also, Darwin’s work on barnacles before noticed that individual barnacle was representative of a species. I can point out only these examples of facts that you have used in your writing technique in the book “Too Big To Know” to make ease for people to understand your thought about knowledge.
Therefore, Mr. David, you should revise this book to complete all elements that you miss in order to be in same level as today’s modern technical. Thanks