Diego Berrueta

(This is a reprint of the original post)

Yet another book review. Yesterday I completed another reading, in this case, of Turabian's "Manual for Writers". I bought the book to improve the quality of a dissertation that I'm due to deliver by next month (more details will probably follow in next posts). It's not that I'm ashamed of the quality of my previous works (for instance, Zinc was acknowledged as a fine piece of research and writing), but everything can be improved, and everyone should try to do their best.

This book, however, hasn't been as useful as I thought it would be. Many of the advices weren't new for me, or have little use in my case. Anyway, some chapters are really funny to read, because they were written more than 20 years ago, when computers weren't as popular and powerful as they are now, and typewriters were much more common. Word-processing software was at its infancy; screens and printers were pretty limited in their features. So all pieces of advice on how to use a computer and a word-processor to prepare the dissertation are deliciously old-fashioned. In spite of my age, I can recognize myself using those applications and old computer hardware twenty years ago. Maybe I'll post on this in the future.