Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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75 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More valuable than Strunk and White, March 5, 2001
This little-known gem is the very best American book on writing and grammar. I have found it immensely valuable over an 18-year career as newspaper reporter, magazine editor, columnist and technical writer. Williams teaches you to write clearly and directly, to eliminate the bureaucratic bull and to make your sentences sing. When I was a cub reporter, I would do a few of his exercises in my head each morning as I warmed up the car. By the time I had finished the book, I could cut through the deadly jargon of school committee babble and social service double-talk and put my reports in words that people could read without slipping into a coma. The most amazing thing about this book is that it isn't famous in the writing community. If you care about your writing, buy it -- you can't go wrong.
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51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Make Your Syntax Mirror Your Semantics, August 2, 2003
Style was the main text for a course on editing that I recently took, and I'm glad it was. I've heard my share of vague and prescriptive advice on writing--avoid the passive, be succinct, revise often, etc.--but Style gave me a more tangible set of practical tools to parse prose and rework syntax towards, as he calls it, "clarity and grace." Williams's program has since become second nature to me, and it has sharpened my writing and my editing tremendously.
In this genre, many handbooks contain different permutations of the same tired advice. Some of this advice Williams has included, including eliminating wordiness and putting emphasis at the ends of sentences, but I was struck by how much of what Williams advises was unusually specific and amazingly fresh.
Williams's program goes like this: avoid nominalizations, which are nouns derived from verbs, often ending in suffixes such as -ing and -tion. Use verbs to describe actions. Use nouns to describe characters. So far, this will change "our analysis of the company's performance" to the more straightforward "we analyzed how the company performed". He adds: put the topic, or something that refers back to prior discourse at the beginning of the sentence. Put the grammatical subject, verb, and object(s) as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible, with minimal interruptions between. Then pile everything else afterwards. Williams aims to show the reader how to make their style transparent and effortless by making the syntax mirror the semantics as much as possible. At times I felt like this could be condensed into a few paragraphs, but, of course, 300 pages makes this book a more substantial package, and it gives space for practice exercises and illustrative examples.
There's no tsk-tsk rules. Williams doesn't give advice in bullet-pointed directives or in disconnected bits and pieces; he builds an editing system that functions as a coherent whole. In a way, it's like learning a foreign language: although the vocabulary is the same, you learn how to express yourself in a more lucid syntax that is contrary to the ways that many of us instinctively write. Each of the first nine chapters builds on the previous. What you learn is an interconnected system of editing, a new way to dissect and reassemble sentences.
I especially want to emphasize how Williams does in this book four things that set him apart from just about every other writing guru out there:
1. He narrows the scope of his book to sentence level revisions. Many competitors either never define their scope, or they default into trying to encompass every phase the writing process. By setting his scope so narrow, Williams can delve into the excruciating details of the rhetoric of the sentence. His program can truly help you perfect one small part of your writing; just don't expect this book to teach you how to do research or how to organize your paper.
2. He makes grammar useful. I have seriously wondered whether students who learn grammar learn to do anything practical besides parsing sentences and nitpicking "mistakes". Many studies show it's not helpful to writing, but that may be because grammar is traditionally taught as a mechanical list of no-no's or a pedantic exercise in labelling. Williams differs in that he treats grammar as a descriptive nomenclature that allows editors to more consciously manipulate a sentence's syntax in ways that mirror its semantics.
3. He rejects rigid prescriptivism, and urges that "[t]he alternative to blind obedience is selective observance." Many other writing handbooks, such as Hacker and Strunk and White, never make this distinction, so they freely mix their good advice with longstanding myths about not splitting infinitives and other silliness. That sort of advice helps your writing about as much as avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk helps your health.
4. He draws on linguistic research. Writing handbooks traditionally come from writers in the humanities, writers who overlook empirical research in favor of a well-crafted argument. Williams breaks from tradition as he informs his text with Eleanore Rosch's research in Prototype Semantics. The often incommunicado disciplines of Linguistics and Writing come together, complimenting the other quite effectively.
Style is not a book for beginners. If you haven't done some college-level writing, this book won't help much. Also, you should already be familiar enough with grammatical terminology that you can parse a sentence into its constituents. Although Williams does briefly review grammar, you will get overwhelmed if you have to learn both a grammar lesson and a style lesson simultaneously.
The biggest problem with this book is that it still remains such a secret.
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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best, one of the worst, December 1, 2005
This book was written to serve as a college textbook (almost certainly for a full quarter or semester freshman composition class), so of course Mr. Williams is going to take 50,000 words to say what he could have said in 5000, and not just by including lots of exercises (although he does that). It was written by a perfesser, so be warned. However, there's good news.
Most books on writing are basically lectures that focus either on correcting mistakes (avoiding passive voice, removing deadwood phrases, etc.) or on following correct writing practices (use active voice, choose the precise word, etc.), generally with lots of examples thrown in. Their premise is that if you tell readers the right/wrong things to do/not to do and show them examples, they'll learn.
But this book - if you stick with it - will *teach you how* to build effective sentences and, to a limited extent, effective paragraphs. Williams' approach is based on three simple principles:
a. People look to the FIRST of a sentence - and to the subject+verb[+object] duo/trio, in particular - to learn what the sentence is about, the subject matter. So, put subject+verb[+object] near the first of the sentence. Keep introductory phrases relevant and short, and DO NOT break this duo/trio up with lots of extraneous material.
b. People remember what's at the end of the sentence best/longest, so put the POINT, the stuff you want to drive home to the reader, at or near the END of the sentence.
c. Vary this pattern to create a logical flow from sentence to sentence, even using the dreaded, evil active voice when it enhances the sentence-to-sentence flow.
If writers would follow these simple principles, at least one third of my job as a technical editor would be unnecessary. And if you work through Williams' book, doing even a few of the exercises, not only will you write better sentences, you'll be in control of what you write!
Now for the negatives. First, Williams' own writing is neither particularly graceful nor particularly clear. He introduces a *third* set of terms (in addition to parts of speech and grammatical functions) to describe what's going on in a sentence, and he introduces little box diagrams that I found abstract and difficult to understand. He spends much more time/space on sentence structure than paragraph structure. And especially in the first chapters, he adopts an elitist tone of "those who read carefully and correctly will certainly agree with me" that I found annoying.
As I said, if you can stick with it, this book will actually show you **how** to construct workable sentences, even if the author could and should have taken his own advice a little more to heart.
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