Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace [Paperback]

Joseph M. Williams (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 309 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321024087
• ISBN-13: 978-0321024084
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #249,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More valuable than Strunk and White, March 5, 2001

By 

Walter H. Crockett (Worcester, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace (Paperback)

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.

388 of 494 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Strunk and White for poindexters, May 30, 2002

By 

Brian (NYC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace (Paperback)

Strunk and White tell us to "omit needless words", and rely on taste to be our guide. The methodical Dr. Williams, viewing this as old-fashioned, sets out to define exactly what words are needless, and why, and how best to get rid of them. It's a worthy goal. Too bad the book stinks.

It's funny that Williams quotes H. L. Mencken's remark that most books about writing are badly written. He first quotes it, then goes on to prove it.

Normal humans from Planet Earth wouldn't say "stylistic infelicity" when they meant "bad writing". They wouldn't say "peripherally relevant" when they meant "closely related". And they wouldn't dream of saying "topicalize X", not even under torture, if what they wanted to say was "make X the topic of the sentence". (You read that right, the guy unashamedly says "topicalize".)

Want some idea of what you'll be getting yourself into? Check out this boner of a sentence, typical of the writing style of the whole book:

"But the object of our attention is writing whose success we measure not primarily by the pleasure we derive from it, but by how well it does a job of work."

Someone ought to tell this guy to omit needless words. The parallelism isn't parallel, the phrase "of our attention" is pointless, the phrase "whose success we measure" is awkward, and that "job OF WORK" is simply nauseating. I know it's an idiom, but still -two needless words!

An Earthling would write something like this:

"Our goal is not just pleasant prose, but effective prose."

So the whole book is written in turgid-ese, even while trying to speak out against it. It's all just an endless wearying slog through the mire. Not unintelligible, just not worth the effort. For what do we learn at the end of the Long March? We learn we should omit needless words.

Last but not least, the book is a typographical disaster, with everything jumbled together and packed into the page. Skimming is impossible.

Many of the five star reviews here are from technical writers, engineers, and so forth. I see a guy from MIT, another from Compuserve, and that's as it should be. They're enured to bad English already, and I'm sure that compared to an engineering textbook this is John friggin' Keats. But for the rest of us, it's just not good enough.

(It's by a linguist, after all, and what the heck do they know about language?)

So it's back to Strunk and White for non-fiction. If you're interested in clearing up confusion in your fiction, check out The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman and/or Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mainly fixes sentences, January 13, 2000

By 

johare4 (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace (Paperback)

This book contains many examples of horribly convoluted prose, many of them contrived to be more obscure than anyone could imagine. These bad examples are fixed using useful general principles, like replacing names for actions with verbs.

The focus is primarily on sentences with some attention to paragraphs. The book "The New Oxford Guide to Writing" by Thamas Kane is more ambitious in covering the organization of larger documents and including a more varied approach to making text interesting.

Bottom line: Williams to fix the egregious, Kane to make things sing.