Wadler's Blog

Many thanks to the organisers of PLMW for inviting me to give a talk. Additional resources are listed below.

• Philip Wadler, lectures on communication skills (video).
• Richard W. Hamming, You and Your Research (video).
• William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, Longman, 1999 (Fourth edition), £4.71 from Amazon.
• Free Online Edition of William Strunk, Jr.'s 1918 original.
• Geoffrey Pullum, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice. I stand by my claim that the modest monetary and time cost to read Strunk and White is the best investment you can make in your career, but do take into account Pullum's critique. (My thanks to those who alerted me to Pullum's article.)
• Donald Knuth, Technical writing. Section 1 is particularly valuable.
• George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, from Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Penguin, 1969.
• C.A.R. Hoare, Advice, offered at Marktoberdorf 2006.
• C.A.R. Hoare, Envoi, in Essays in Computing Science, C.A.R. Hoare and C.B. Jones, editors, Prentice Hall, 1989.
• Sir Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, Penguin, 2004 (Third revised edition.) [Recommended to me by others.]
• Joseph Williams, Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, University of Chicago Press, 1995 (new edition). [Recommended to me by others.]
• Lyn Dupre, Bugs in Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2nd edition, 1998. [Recommended to me by others.]
• Max Atkins, Lend Me Your Ears: All you need to know about making speeches and presentations, Vemilion, 2004.
• David Allen, Getting Things Done: How to achieve stress-free productivity, Piatkus, 2001.
• Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, 2001 (second edition).
• Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, 1990. (Challenger is discussed on pages 38–52.)
• Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, Graphics Press, 1997.
• Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, Graphics Press, 2006. (Powerpoint is discussed on pages 156–185.)
• Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.
• Randy Pausch, Time Management.
• Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle.
• Bret Victor, Magic Ink.
• TED Talks.

Added later:

• Lesley Lamport, How to present a paper.
• Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style.

My first year in Oxford I fell foul of the fourth-from-last entry, if you replace 'dinner' by 'tea'.

London government poster from 2002, according to Wired.  My reaction is the same as that of Simon Davies:

"I thought it was a powerful piece of political satire from a disruptive citizen's group, but then it dawned on me that they were real," Davies said. "It's acutely disturbing."