Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Learning to Give, Take, and Use Instructions

By Richard Saul Wurman

Architect, graphic designer, consultant to industry, and purveyor of information packaging, Wurman now attempts to teach us how to teach and how to take teaching. Let it be a lesson to us all. After... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553074253
• ISBN13: 9780553074253
• Release Date: December 1991
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 387 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Not a how-to

Ths subtitle suggests that this will be a blow-by-blow walkthrough on just about everything to do with instructions. The previous reviewer can be forgiven for thinking it was supposed to teach him how to right them, or rather, his instructor could be forgiven (if an instructor SHOULD be forgiven for not reading a book before assigning it). In fact, it deals in a rather desultory but very diverting and thoughtful way with how people learn things from other people, deliberately and by the use of mediating information, i.e. not just by on-the-spot imitation, and with special attention to the job environment. It's really a philosophical rather than a practical approach, though most of his examples are close enough to practice to strike this rather philosophically-minded reader as practical. And if it's aimed at anyone in particular, I would say it's America's self-important and trend-crazy managerial class, rather than technical writers or their readers among those workers who still really work rather than just schmooze with the other drones. Unfortunately, I'm not sure very many people read this book. I'm looking at this library's copy and it hasn't been borrowed in years. So maybe it doesn't matter what it's about. Where's the chick lit?