Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition) [Paperback]

Joseph M. Williams (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0205605354 | ISBN-13: 978-0205605354 | Publication Date: January 20, 2008 | Edition: 3

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace reflects the wisdom and clear authorial voice of Williams’ best-selling book, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, while streamlining every chapter to create a very brief, yet powerfully direct guide to writing with style.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 3 edition (January 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0205605354
• ISBN-13: 978-0205605354
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great resource for writers and editors, September 1, 2008

By 

Paralogue (US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

I wish I had this book five years ago when I was starting out as a copy editor at my college newspaper. In this abridged version of the text, Williams provides guidelines and techniques as to how to revise problematic sentences. He dissects the problems in a clear fashion and leads the reader through the process of editing through the problems. It takes only a few hours to read, but sessions of careful re-reading will prove rewarding for your writing and editing skills.

Although the focus is on nonfiction writing, insofar as I can tell, the advice and methods Williams presents can be applied beyond nonfiction. Williams does use a lot of grammar terminology and does diagram some sentences, almost a lost skill nowadays, but he explains himself clearly, concisely, and with examples.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who seeks to improve their writing and editing skills, especially at the college level. Added bonus: this is more inexpensive compared to the unabridged version of the book.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Can Do This!, September 30, 2008

By 

S. Heron - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

For years, I've struggled with poor grammar and other hindrances to good writing--but not anymore. The information taught in this book couldn't have been presented any clearer. If you cringe at the idea of memorizing endless, illogical rules of grammar, then this book is for you. It's logical, direct and very motivating! Now, I fearlessly take on any writing challenge. This review is a perfect example. I find myself just looking for any opportunity to show off what I've learned!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars People need this book., January 24, 2011

By 

Jim Beaner "James" (Grand Rapids, MI) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

To writers at most skill-levels, Style is a guide that can be used to help your writing be intuitively processed and retained by your reader. The focus is less on grammatical rules than improving textual linguistic intelligence. The author presents the instruction in a hierarchical framework; first providing guidance for the structure of individual sentences, and then gradually building in complexity to how sentences are arranged to promote coherence and cohesion. The goal is again, for you to formulate writing that is clear, concise and intuitive to your reader, a skill (i.e. empathy) surely unnatural to humanity.

Specifically, the author suggests formatting sentences with characters as subjects and actions as verbs. Nominalizations and passive verbs (in most cases) are especially under critique because they add needless density. Also, by presenting information from easy to complex and new information last, he argues you will better hold your reader's attention. Throughout, he gives suggestions to improve problematic sentences through editing; drawing specific attention to revisions through the use of boldface, capitalization, and italics. I found the latter chapters, particular the chapters on shape and elegance to be the most insightful for improving my writing.

The book itself succeeds in promoting clarity of writing and presenting of information. I consistently found myself trying to catch the author not follow his own advice, a futile effort considering the number of editions in print! And to his credit, every time I found myself asking a question in my head, it was subsequently addressed. The author uses multiple techniques to convey sometimes dense information, such as bulleting, tables, boxed in summaries, and sentence structure diagrams - all helpful tools.

I particularly liked how the author examined the benefits, costs, and limitations of his recommendations and made clear the exceptions to the rules. I also found useful the recommendations on metadiscourse that hedge and intensify. The author is wise in addressing that use of these words will indicate how you balance your caution and confidence, an especially important concept in my field, where science writers often make environmental management recommendations. I was specifically struck by the author's comment that writing does not only shape your thinking, it also generates it. This was a prominent idea to me because on a few occasions my writing has generated new ideas, but I was never sure why. I hope that by writing with a rhythmical balance as suggested in this book, that new ideas are increasing generated by my writing. I also connected with the author's chapter on the ethics of writing. I thought about writers conveying different messages, depending on their intended goal, illustrated in the author's example of how a writer's tone can be impacted by their employer.
One weakness of the book is that I often found myself searching for a particular section to reference. With such a brief table of contents (only chapters), it was difficult to locate sections within chapters without a key word to look up in the index. As I intend to use this book for reference, I would benefit from an extended table of contents and perhaps color-coded reference tabs.

In sum, I should have read this book a long time ago. Instead, I have been navigating the rights and wrongs of prose through editors' red ink, subtly learning the rules of a form I thought was art. Indeed it is, but the foundation on which to build my style has been uncovered though reading of this book. I rate the book a 9 out 10, simply because it can be hard to quickly reference. In terms of its potential impact on society, I believe that this book should be required reading for all introductory college writing classes. Its simplicity and content offer many benefits to the craft of writing and emphasize the first step toward communicating more effectively - recognition of the problem.