IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION. VOL. PC-20, NO. 4, DECEMBER 1977 239

Technical Drawings and Illustrations

GEORGE A. MAGNAN

Abstract—Technical graphics originated with the simple need for in­structional drawings, but has expanded to include a large variety of ap­plications, materials, processes, and techniques. Engineers and scientists who must frequently communicate complex technical concepts should have a sufficient knowledge of the various types of artwork and meth­ods of preparation that they can plan, direct, and participate in prepar­ing their technical graphics. The types of technical publications pro­duced by most technical organizations are described; guidance toward planning their illustrative content is offered; and a number of sources for visual infonnation are suggested.

T H E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S G A P

IN American industry a vast "communications gap" cur­rently wastes huge sums of money annually, causes delays in

carrying out vital projects, and loses companies priceless busi­ness opportunities. This communications gap is largely due to the exponential growth of new, diverse, and overlapping, tech­nologies, each generating its own special body of knowledge. It has become increasingly difficult to communicate this knowl­edge to others because of the rate at which it is accumulating.

During the last two decades there has been a growing com­prehension of this problem, which has been reflected in a great increase in the internal efforts of most large corporations to bridge the gap. The efforts have been mainly through acceler­ating information interchanges between groups who must work together within the parameters of complex, technically interre­lated programs and projects, but who find it increasingly diffi­cult because of the vertical specializations of their separate fields and the limitations of the very languages that are in­volved. Many engineers, in particular, are finding it difficult to understand each other or to communicate their messages to others simply as a result of the accretion of "jargon"-the spe­cial terminology applying only to a particular field, which peo­ple not in that field cannot comprehend without an interpreter.

Continuing growth of vertical specialization in technology creates new problems as we reorient ourselves to a second in­dustrial revolution-that of the computer-which frees man from much of his formerly necessary mental labor and thus multiplies his intellectual capacities. As Marshall McLuhan points out, in our age of "electric technology," the range of man's interests, far from shrinking to some infinity-point of overspecialism, is becoming forced by the imperatives of the new age to broaden into a total process of learning and know­ing. "This means," says McLuhan, "that all forms of employ-

Reprinted with permission from Using Technical Art; An industry

Guide, Chapter 1, copyright 1970 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

The author is an Editor for St. Regis Publications and Syndicate Mag­azines, New York; his address is 226 Pasqual Ave., Ventura, CA 93003, (805) 647-7977.

ment become 'paid learning,' and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information." (Italics added.)

A significant element in this "movement of information" to which McLuhan refers is the visual aid. Graphic pictorial types of information are recognized and increasingly used for their vital communication value, both as unique media in their own right and for their usefulness in supplementing the written and spoken word.

V I S U A L A I D S I N A M E R I C A N I N D U S T R Y

This reliance on visual media has not always been so; in fact, just prior to World War II the use of pictorials in industry's technical communication was limited to blueprints and the few perspective-type technical illustrations grudgingly deemed necessary for use by mechanics and technicians in operating and servicing equipment. Instruction booklets containing dia­grams and illustrations, like all promotional graphics, litera­ture, and advertising, were mostly outside the sphere of inter­est of manufacturers, who wanted nothing but product-making operations going on within their gates. There were no publica­tions groups, reproductions departments, or technical artists. As a consequence, the business of internal as well as external generation of technical and promotional information was an "orphan" left to the company's advertising agency when it was considered worthy of bothering with at all.

This situation changed irrevocably with the advent of World War II . Industry, forced overnight into greatly expanding its operations and making new, complex products, found techni­cal illustrations indispensable as visual aids in training unskilled production workers, providing a communications "bridge" be­tween diverse employees, departments, executives, and ven­dors, and establishing for the first time a complete, thorough, and accurate documentation in the form of technical manuals needed to service, operate, and repair military equipment in the field.

Once introduced within industry, new concepts and uses for technical graphics flourished. Technical illustrations were dis­covered to be useful not only as production aids and hand­book illustrations but as instruments of communication, en­abling nontechnical people to grasp new design concepts, unusual and complex principles, and advanced planning propos­als generated by research scientists, designers, and engineers.

Today, although technical illustrations continue to serve their original, useful role as adjuncts to production and descrip­tive literature, something new has been added: a sophisticated variety of visual communication techniques used as internal aids in research and development projects and in promoting product development from their earliest design stages to accep­tance through customer-oriented presentations and proposals (see Fig. 1).

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240 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. PC-20, NO. 4, DECEMBER 1977

MAGNAN: TECHNICAL DRAWINGS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 241

Technical briefings, meetings, and sessions of one kind or another are at an all-time high—especially those using well-prepared illustrations, diagrams, charts and graphs, and other visual aids. Improved graphic forms of communication appear in company reports, studies, and informational literature. They are designed to create interdisciplinary understanding among the technical people themselves and to build a bridge between the scientists and mostly nontechnical, company executives and top management, and also between the technical project planners and government and commercial customers. Vastly expanded use of audio-visual presentations of all kinds are an­other result of this communication effort. In addition, the at­tempt to maintain close managerial control through constant, detailed visibility of all facets of a company's operations-financial, production, research, development, etc.—requires putting all the facts into the best graphic form that can be readily assimilated.

In some highly concentrated areas of industry, all these di­verse aims have evolved into major programs planned and car­ried out by graphic communications experts. In many medium-sized companies and practically ail the small ones, the average engineer, scientist, technical specialist, or executive is still left pretty much on his own to solve his problems of visual com­munications as they arise. In any case, he continues to face another growing problem of properly interpreting and demon­strating specialized facts concerning his projects in such a way that higher management, other internal collaborators, custom­ers, and very often the general public as well can understand what he is doing and what he seeks to accomplish.

In this drive to disseminate information, visual aids are a powerful, effective ally, sometimes an all-important one. In a competitive situation the well-illustrated exposition very often wins over other proposals of equal technical merit but less well illustrated, simply because the former is better understood.

But there are a great many types of technical visual aids. What set of guidelines can be used? What are the criteria for intelligently determining what type of drawing or illustration will best fit each special situation?

W H A T W I L L C O M M U N I C A T E BEST?

There is one simple basic criterion. Pictures or drawings should be planned, the method of delineation selected, and the project carried through from start to finish on the basis of the question: What will communicate best? What type of visual can best be understood by the person who must use this infor­mation? Not:

What will look the handsomest? What is most convenient for the illustrator? What was the way it always has been done before?

Put yourself in the position of the user. How will he use the information being supplied? If he is a mechanic, for example, what type of diagram or illustration will he need to perform a certain maintenance operation? There he stands, wrenches in hand, looking through an opened access door at exposed ma­chinery. Visualize him glancing at his repair manual, opened to the correct page. Does the spread contain all the informa­tion he needs to fix that equipment-pictures, text, and all-or

must he interrupt his work to leaf through the book to look up information on other pages? Are the part numbers on the drawing easily read, and do the arrows from them follow the simplest route to the parts shown, without crisscrossing other arrows or parts of the drawing? And most important of all, is the equipment drawn from the same viewing angle that he looks at it? He will have much more difficulty if, for instance, the only way to get at the parts is from underneath, but the il­lustration is what he would see looking down at the equipment. This common-sense injunction is violated much more often than one might think, since many manuals save on art time by drawing all views, without exception, to a single, standardized three-quarters upper view. Publications and art chiefs can count tangible savings from this standardization, but nobody knows how much time is lost in the field using these drawings which, essentially, have been made for the convenience of the illustrator-not the userl

For any type of visual communication to be really effec­tive, there must be understanding between the three parties involved-the initiator (engineer, executive, or other person who generates the need to express his ideas visually), the illus­trator (art director, draftsman, designer, illustrator, and others who translate the initiator's message into pictorial form), and the user (all those who need to understand the pictorial mes­sage in order to carry out their own work). Ideally, the visual concept flows from initiator to illustrator to user, with provi­sion for feedback from user to initiator to gauge the merit of the concept and provide a basis for future experience. But this ideal communications flow does not exist much of the time, largely because of the nature of drawings themselves and the way they are interpreted.

There are five basic types of drawings used in industry:

Orthographies Two-dimensional engineering drawings Diagrams Functional, schematic, block, flow, wir­

ing, etc.; charts and graphs Axonometrics Three-dimensional drawings lacking van­

ishing-point perspective Perspectives Three-dimensional drawings with picture

planes diminishing to vanishing points with distance, as in nature

Photographs Continuous-tone camera pictures

The first type of drawing, orthographies, and to some extent the second, diagrams, are well understood by the initiator, if he is an engineer. They are equally well understood by the mechanical draftsman and most technical illustrators. Inter­communication here is smooth, even quite chummy. But the user—unless he is an experienced machinist who is well-trained at reading blueprints-finds the orthographic language hard to grasp. The nontechnical user-the salesman or marketing ex­pert, for example-is left quite out in the cold if the blueprint is the only visual record of what something looks like.

Quite the opposite situation seems to exist when three-dimensional pictorials prevail. Whereas there is close rapport between the illustrator and the user, the engineer-initiator and the illustrator find it difficult to communicate because the ini­tiator has been trained to express his thoughts in the ortho­graphic, not the pictorial, language and generally does not un­derstand why the illustrator wants to do certain things. Only

242 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. PC-20, NO. 4, DECEMBER 1977

by better understanding the methods, uses, and practices in­volved in all the types of drawings used in industry can the ini­tiator be in the position to select, specify, and direct visual me­dia so as to provide the most efficient communication to users.

I N D U S T R Y ' S T E C H N I C A L L I T E R A T U R E

The engineer or project director who functions most effec­tively, with a record of success for his projects, is not likely to be narrow-minded, or one to hide his light or his company's under a bushel. Indeed, if there are any bushels involved, they are more likely to be the bushels of well-illustrated publica­tions he generates to make sure of communicating essential in­formation to everyone concerned, at all levels! Especially in the case of complex projects involving esoteric concepts which cut across a number of scientific disciplines, final success or failure can often be equated with his ability to get his message across to fellow workers, management, and the customer. Whether or not he, as project head, actually takes much part in the preparation of these publications, he is ultimately responsi­ble for their success or lack of it in "breaking through" to his audience. Most, if not all, of this literature is technical and in­tended to convey strictly technical information. Broadly speaking, technical literature falls into the following categories.

Reports

(a) Internally used progress reports, for management visibility.

( b ) Regularly issued, periodic progress reports to a commer­cial customer, or to the military or government agency con­cerned if the project is under government contract. Most gov­ernment agencies require these reports to be issued on a monthly and annual basis, as a contractual condition.

Proposals

Engineering proposals, design, feasibility studies, and manu­facturing capability studies are most generally employed as a major device to bring in new business. They sum up the con­clusions of scientists and engineers, either in brief, generally unsolicited, "idea" evaluations or, at the other extreme, in multivolume, detailed studies when the company is invited to compete for a major contract.

Writing and illustrating proposals is mainly done by technical publications people working directly with engineers, usually with some further collaboration of the company's sales or mar­keting group.

instruction Manuals

Instruction manuals may include under a single cover all technical information needed to use and maintain a product, or they may run to many separate manuals in the case of com­plex equipment such as aircraft. In general, the following are the types of handbook instruction involved:

(a) Operational manuals. (b ) Parts catalogs (illustrated parts breakdown). ( c ) Maintenance manuals—often including service bulletins,

testing, checkout, and support equipment manuals, and sys­tems manuals.

(d ) Repair manuals.

Many handbooks, manuals, bulletins, etc. are usually gen­erated on any major technical project for the purpose of in­structing technicians, assemblers, etc. on correct assembly pro­cedures, manufacturing planning sequences, tooling, etc.

Promotional Aids

In addition to literature of a strictly technical nature, the en­gineer is frequently called upon for written information, sketches, and data to be ultimately incorporated into promo­tional literature, such as product information sheets or bulle­tins, specifications, descriptive sales literature, promotional brochures, and sales catalogs.

There is a vast difference between the technical publications needed for firms working under defense contracts and those required to cover commercial products. A government survey has disclosed that the amount of documentation required to comply with military specifications is at least three times that used to supply needed technical data, instructions, etc. for comparable commercial items. A growing number of technical handbooks are devoted to the testing of military products. In one military system described under a government contract, the manuals on description, operation, maintenance, and train­ing were only a third of the total manuals specified; another third consisted of illustrated parts manuals, and the remaining third covered nothing but operating test procedures.

In preparing all these informational aids, which usually are developed concurrently with the engineering project itself, the engineer is not generally left to his own devices. Although most companies encourage engineers to write technical papers, some prefer to leave the drafting of basic handbook texts to technicians who write under the engineer's supervision, and then send that text to the technical publications editor. How­ever, there are some companies, both large and small, in which technical writing is done only by trained engineers in the belief that the writers need intimate knowledge of the technology in order to communicate it properly, and the only editing by publications people is a "polishing up." Most companies take a position between these extremes. But the trend is toward greater reliance upon the original design engineer to supply more complete and sophisticated documentation, as machines and products to be designed become increasingly complex.

In any case, the text can be written. But when it comes to illustrating that manual properly—that is where difficulties of­ten arise. The reason is that the engineer is generally not half as capable, by training or experience, of expressing himself graphically as he is with words. His college background today includes little or no instruction in the uses of visual communi­cation beyond blueprint reading-even though expressing his thoughts in visual terms is the engineer's chief stock-in-trade! In most companies, the technical editor is much better ac­quainted with graphics, particularly as they are related to the mechanics of reproduction. But he cannot explain the engi­neer's idea to the illustrator—only the engineer can do that. Whenever this situation results in an impasse, communication failure results; it usually takes the form of an addition to the collection of technical literature in which the graphics are in­adequate to convey the intended message. Such literature rep­resents enormous waste.

MAGNAN: TECHNICAL DRAWINGS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 243

P L A N N I N G P U B L I C A T I O N S A R T W O R K

How can this situation be improved? How can the engineer go about seeing to it that his books are illustrated in a manner that will get his message across, adequately and clearly?

Getting the Message Across

In the first place, let's take a better look at the type and na­ture of the graphics involved. Just as a technical man will tend to rely upon the use of special words which, even though com­pletely valid and understandable to fellow professionals, are in­comprehensible to others, he will also do the same thing with his visual language! Too often, the technician, engineer, or en­gineering executive relies upon such visual aids as a blueprint or involved types of graphs such as the log-log to carry the bur­den of his communication. He does this because they are the visuals he is most familiar with from his background and on-the-job design experience and because they have already been prepared and are readily available from the nearest drafting room crib. Since these types of engineering graphics are second nature to him, he does not always realize that blueprints call upon special training and long practice for most people to grasp. He forgets that they can often be misread even by ex­perts and that a drawing which he and the shop machinist un­derstand perfectly may be quite unintelligible to the very non­technical people- clients, top management, etc.—at whom his message is aimed. He also forgets that not everyone knows what is, to him, a familiar language, and that to most others the effort of rotating parts mentally through certain specified rotations can be quite baffling.

In addition, only too often these engineering drawings are prepared by draftsmen for large-scale same-size reproduction, and will reproduce badly when reduced to a fraction of their scale for offset printing on an 8.5-in. X 11-in. page, the most commonly used format of most industrial publications.

The engineer often fails to consider the need for time that proper preparation of copy for reproduction entails, a factor which by itself can do quite as much graphic harm as using the wrong type of illustrations. No technical planner would un­dertake a design or manufacturing project without his PERT chart, or at least a schedule allotting time to each phase to be undertaken. The same is true of any visual communications project; planning, design and execution of artwork, and ade­quate reproduction time must be planned in consultation with publications and reproductions people if the final publication is to meet its deadline and be fit to look at if the deadline is met.

Very often the engineer is fortunate enough to have at his command a technical art department; he can see the art direc­tor or leadman, discuss his problem directly or in a three-way conversation with the technical publication editor, and, with a little patient consultation, arrive at a practical program for ef­fectively illustrating the literature. The program can then be carried out by technical artists and others concerned. He can consult with the draftsman or artist, draw rough pencil sketches to illustrate what he wants, and explain in detail.

But even here, the engineer needs some familiarity with the nature and types of technical graphics, as well as general guide­lines to follow, so that he can inteDigently direct the prepara­

tion of artwork that will fulfill the job, but no more than the job, and that will involve the least possible expense. It is just as important to know where to stop as it is to know where to start. The author has seen, along with the more common ex­amples of under-illustrated or wrongly illustrated technical lit­erature, many examples of over-illustrated books. These are the books in which the artist, given free rein, became carried away by his own imagination and his enthusiasm for the saying that a "picture is worth 10,000 words" and has extrapolated this into the concept that it is even better to have 10,000 pic­tures to go with the 10,000 words! Everyone has his own par­ticular set of prejudices common to his calling, and artists will go overboard for pictorials, if allowed.

General Guidelines

How should the engineer go about determining how and what type of technical art, drawing, diagram, etc. should go into a publication?

The way to start is first to reread the entire text carefully, with the question in mind, What pictures are needed in order to explain points brought out in the text? As he finds items that need pictures, he makes a brief notation on the margin of the manuscript at the paragraph which describes it, and num­bers the note.

Going back over those notations, he can then compile a list of these illustrations he considers necessary to

• Describe mechanisms, forces, working principles which cannot be described well, or described at all, verbally.

• Add emphasis to a key idea, statistic, etc. • Show relationships, interconnections between system

components, as in a schematic, block, or flow diagram. • Document authenticity, as in the use of photographs show­

ing a test being performed in a test report, or the state of com­pletion of a project for a progress report.

• Make comparisons, show evolution of product design, etc. • Present statistics meaningfully, as in a bar or pie chart. • Show step-by-step operations visually to help workers as­

semble, install, repair parts more accurately, faster than they could by reading written steps.

I L L U S T R A T I O N SOURCES

This is the point at which the engineer can save himself and his company a lot of money, trouble, and time—although it might not seem that way at first sight.

He should take a little time to do some digging. The techni­cal illustrator who will have to convert photos and drawings into reproducible artwork for publication needs all the backup data the engineer can give him. By providing all the pictorial data, (1 ) the engineer knows that they are the right data, and (2 ) he will be able to use pictures, photos, etc. which the illus­trator might have trouble finding. I f the illustrator is furnished only with whatever scanty material the engineer has close at hand and is left to track down the rest, the project may be de­layed unduly and prove unsatisfactory in the end. Ii is surpris­ing how many drawings, sketches, photos, and other invaluable reference pictorials a project engineer can find right in his own desk file—if he takes the trouble to look. In addition, through-

244 ÏEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. PC-20, NO. 4, DECEMBER 1977

out his organization, there are all kinds of visuals of which he may not be aware but which concern his project and could prove useful, if he bothers to make inquiries and is able to rec­ognize a visual's potential.

The thing for him to remember is that an illustration appear­ing in a technical publication should concentrate on reducing a single point to its essence—the very opposite of most engineer­ing drawings, which present endless detail. But by a judicious editing, a good many engineering drawings can be made to yield simplified delineations. The simplified version can then either be direct-traced by the illustrator ôr be reproduced by "scissors-drafting" or other techniques which eliminate all the extras. The result is a sharp, simple, master drawing.

As an example, consider a progress report on the prototype development of a large piece of equipment. In order to start work on the project in the machine shop, some machinery must be relocated and a new arrangement of special tooling set up. The new arrangement must be shown in diagrammatic form in the report. The accepted procédurals for the illustra­tor to obtain the engineer's sketches, visit the area in question to make an on-the-spot rough layout to work from, then re­turn to the drawing board for study, layout, and translation into a finished pen-and-ink illustration, all of which may take the illustrator assigned to the job between eight and twelve hours.

Is there any way to shorten this lengthy-and costly-procedure? Perhaps so. In engineering facilities, where plant layouts are planned, there is a drafting room; and somewhere in its files there must be a floor plan showing the present loca­tion o f all equipment in the machine shop, and the floor space the shop occupies in relation to other shops. To keep up with rapid changes, these drawings are generally prepared from heavy film transparencies on which movable templates of scaled fur­niture, tools, etc. are shifted about to meet relocation drawing needs. I f the proposed new layout has not already been set up, drawn, and diazo-printed, it can be done. Often by getting a sharp, black-line diazo print from the master, eliminating un­wanted detail and callouts with eradicators, then adding ink-line nomenclature where needed, the technical artist can create an "instant" drawing, graphically showing all needed details of the physical layout. This example is typical of what can be done if the engineer, or the technician working with him on a given project, thinks ahead on a technical publication's visual layout, and—again we say—will do a little digging.

L O O K I N G F O R V I S U A L D A T A

It may save much time in the end for the engineer to tap po­tential sources of visual documentation in separate plant func­tional groups such as the following:

Reproductions The first persons he should see are the repro­ductions chief and the chief photographer. Each has a truly remarkable memory for pictorials, and will remember maps, plans, blueprints, diagrams, sketches, and photographs pertain­ing to the project which have passed through his hands from others. Through the master negative and print file it is possible to backtrack these items by checking dates, assigned titles, and other information.

Drafting Room Certainly there is an engineering-drawing

history to the project. In their existing form, the pencil trac­ings probably will not yield the kind of direct visual copies which can be used to any extent in reproduced literature, but the drawings are invaluable when used as reference material and often can themselves be doctored to make worthwhile master drawings for literature reproduction. If not, they still can be traced to meet a special need in much less time than it would take to create a new layout from scratch.

Production On any project which is important enough to warrant it, there will be support groups backing up the shop effort with various manufacturing, fabricating, assembly, and installation aids, many of which are direct visual aids used on the line. Engineering, production illustrations, and manufac­turing planning are three such groups, any or all of them spend­ing some of their time producing various types of visuals. Many tooling illustrations are drawn in perspective, as are the pro­duction illustrations often used at the beginning of a manufac­turing cycle to spell out assembly sequences and operations. Often in many assembly operations of intricate small assem­blies, workers are provided with line drawings reproduced by diazo, with photographs which identify parts and sequences of soldering, wiring, etc., and with visual aids which combine both drawings and photos. When these aids exist, they can usually be adapted to uses in various types of descriptive tech­nical literature.

Let Someone Else Do It?

To someone who is impatient and who may be facing a dead­line, it may seem like a waste of valuable time to hunt for such material. It is easy to say, "I'll save this time by giving the il­lustrations people some basic rough sketches, and letting them do the necessary research in acquiring background visual copy needed. After all, my time costs the company more than theirs."

It does not usually work that way. Sure, the technical illus­trator or technical art supervisor knows a good picture when he sees one. But the goal is not really to find good pictures as such, so much as to obtain detailed technical information in vi­sual form. Only the engineer, or an associate who has worked directly with him in originating the project, knows exactly what information is needed—what particular facts, figures, de­lineations to select from a jungle of documentation.

It is only when given the proper information that the techni­cal illustrator really begins to function. Once he has the kind of exact, detailed information that is needed-no matter how beat-up, torn, abused-he is equipped to translate it into effec­tive graphics with a message. And he can do it without fre­quent consultations to ask "Is this right?" and "What does this thing really look like?" Certainly there are bound to be con­sultations, but the fewer the better—for whenever a project en­gineer sits down with an illustrator to compare notes, check progress, and ask questions, the artist isn't drawing, and the project engineer isn't project-engineering.

For adequate overview and control of any engineering proj­ect today, the engineer, manager, or technical director needs to know more than the strictly technical details involved. For instance, he needs to know something about finance, in order to keep the allotted budget within bounds, make project cost

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. PC-20, NO. 4, DECEMBER 1977 245

estimates, and understand his company's accounting system. This does not mean he has to be an accountant. In exactly the same way, it is necessary for the successful engineer or execu­tive carrying out industrial projects to know the most effective types of visuals for a given purpose, to know some parameters of quality and practicality, and to have a good idea of the rela­tive costs of the graphics prepared and used under his direction— for which he carries ultimate responsibility. A broad under­standing and familiarity with the types of artwork and meth­ods of preparation is needed to specify effectively the techni­cal graphics required to illustrate technical and sales literature. It is also needed to provide essential across-the-board informa­tion to both technical and nontechnical people concerned with various phases of the project, that is, to such diverse groups as management, shop workers, marketing, sales and other in-industry people, customers, and the public, through other me­dia such as briefings, presentations, and training sessions.

The ability to sketch is vital. Not long ago the blackboard sketch was considered a satisfactory medium for technical talks, and the blueprint, printed in reduced form or simply folded and inserted into a publication package, was a standard visual in technical reports, studies, and proposals. But brief­

ings and presentations now rely on more sophisticated visual supports, such as slides and illustrative charts. It is generally recognized that blueprints no longer suffice in proposals for telling a story to nontechnical users, buyers, or potential cli­ents; and an engineer's or other professional worker's ability to express himself visually is of growing importance.

Where once he was called upon only to make such sketches as would enable a draftsman to depict his design in blueprint form, he is now finding it necessary to communicate directly with the technical illustrator who will prepare perspective or axonometric art work to be used for many purposes, going far beyond the original one of dimensional delineation. And the ability to sketch is almost equally as valuable a tool of commu­nication to sales, marketing, and other experts as to other mem­bers of company management who, in an age of picturization, are frequently called upon to plan and direct the format and contents of publications and to give illustrated talks and pre­sentations. If an individual has little or no artistic talent, it does not mean that he cannot do technical sketching; in fact, if he does not draw well instinctively, it is all the more reason why he should at least know the basic principles governing per­spective and axonometric visualization.

How to Write a Book and Get It Published WILLIAM R. VAN DERSAL

Abstract-The psychology and mechanics of creating and publishing a nonfiction book involve many considerations. Among those discussed here are evaluation of the audience, outlining structure and content, establishing a writing habit, including graphic material, credits and ac­knowledgments, editorial help, agents and publishers, contracts, galley and page proofs, and indexing.

T H E POSSIBLE A U D I E N C E

AF A M O U S orator once remarked that "the first prerequi-, site of any orator is that he must have something to say."

This applies equally well to any author who hopes to write and publish a book.

Revised and reprinted with permission from a paper of the same title, copyright 1973 by William R. Van DersaL The original paper was pre­sented at the 20th International Technical Communications Conference in Houston, TX, May 1973, but was not included in the Conference Proceedings.

The author is a writer and lecturer; his address is 6 S. Kensington St., Arlington, V A 22204, (703) 671-0535.

The first thing a writer needs to find out, one way or an­other, is whether he does indeed have something worth writ­ing about. There are lots of ways to find out. He can go to a library-preferably a good-sized one-and look at all the books that have been published on the subject he has in mind. It's always possible someone else may have written his book. It's equally possible that his idea, or his approach to the subject, is unique: that is, no one else may have thought of it. It's also possible that his intended book may be better, more up-to-date, or have some other feature not present in existing books.

Another way is to state briefly in writing what the intended book will contain, then ask the librarians in a large library for all the books available on this subject. The writer can check this further himself, if he likes. He can ask the librarian for a copy of the list of books in print. She'll supply the subject list, and show him how to use it. Reviewing the titles of books under the appropriate subject heading will tell him whether there's anything in print at the present time. A book is out-of-