Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition) [Paperback]

Joseph M. Williams (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321095170 | ISBN-13: 978-0321095176 | Publication Date: August 7, 2002 | Edition: 7

The best-selling style book, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Seventh Edition , presents principles of writing to help students diagnose their prose quickly and revise it effectively. The four sections-Style as Choice, Clarity, Grace, and Ethics-feature new principles of effective prose, chapter summaries for quick and easy review, and group exercises that encourage students to work and learn together. Williams offers these principles as reason-based approaches to improving prose, rather than hard and fast rules to writing well. Style, 7/e, empowers students to use their writing not only as a tool to identify and solve problems, but also as a method for exploring their own thinking.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 7 edition (August 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321095170
• ISBN-13: 978-0321095176
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best guide to clear writing, December 18, 2003

By 

Grumpy (Irvine, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition) (Paperback)

I taught writing for 10 years at the University of California, and tried a variety of books. The course was oriented toward clear, effective writing -- writing as communication, rather than writing as "little golden thoughts of me." No book teaches these skills as well as Williams, none is even close. There are books that can teach how to write one clear sentence, and Williams does this too. But "Style" takes the next step and shows how to organize a sequence of sentences in a way that makes it easy for your readers to follow an argument or understand an explanation.
The course produced a real improvement in student writing, an improvement that they could see and appreciate. Most of them said it was among the most useful courses they had taken at college.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's like a favorite teacher, April 13, 2004

By 

Joseph Judge (Harrisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition) (Paperback)

I am an independent corporate trainer who teaches people to write better at work. When my students ask me for good books to learn even more, this is the first book I mention. I tell them, "If you are a good writer and you want to be a very good writer, get this book."

I also tell them several other things about the book. First, it is not a book of lists like the excellent resource, The Elements of Style. Instead, it's a challenging textbook that is informative and compelling from beginning to end. Second, it teaches a novel way to keep readers interested in what you are writing. Basically it's narrative, or story telling, within each sentence. Third, it provides guidance on advanced topics such as emphasis, elegance, and ethics. Topics like these might seem esoteric or irrelevant, but the author makes them easy to understand and shows why they are useful, and he does it in a way that is fun to read.

This book is one of those few textbooks that you will remember the same way you remember that favorite teacher. Like that teacher, it brought you to a new level of knowledge, and it did it with humor and style.

I rated this book 5 stars because I think it is superior in all categories for a textbook: useful content, insightful author, clear exposition, skillful publishing, and reasonable price.

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the best, one of the worst, December 1, 2005

By 

Danny M. Hobbs "deebledd" (Tigard, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition) (Paperback)

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.