Customer Reviews

Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

After reading other books on how to organize a technical document, I read this one on how to make my ideas more clear. My sentences and paragraphs now say what I really mean - before my writing was "fuzzy" and my point was unintentionally hidden. The book helps me think clearly, and it helps me understand other's writing more clearly - an unexpected result. The book does not tell me how I should write. It provides nifty techniques on how to quickly revise my writing for greater clarity. Alos, its the first book that explains just what "clarity" is. Worth the money.

I've seen some of the reviews that disparage this book. I weep because they did not see the humor of this book. Style is hilarious. Before I read this book, before I understood the value of language use, I was terrified of editing, because I cannot keep the rules of grammar in my head. Each time I re-read this book, more of its inherent humor comes forth. So much of Joseph William's humor is admittedly subtle, but it is just that wonderful humor that perhaps only careful writers and readers can understand. I must say that this book has been a good part in helping me edit my own work... no: it has helped me want to edit my own work and explore the rules of language as being Real, Folklore or Optional.

Joseph William's book Style taught me that language could actually be fun. I thank him for writing this book.

I have always enjoyed writing and was born with a natural talent for it, but I didn't realize how much better my writing could be until I worked through Joseph Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" in one of my technical writing courses.

Williams' book helped me to see the mistakes I was making in my writing, and with careful practice, my writing has improved a great deal. I am currently a professional writer, and my only regret is that I borrowed the book rather than buying it for my course! Now I wish I had my own copy to reference.

I really enjoyed this book. As an engineer I need all of the help I can get in improving my ponderous style. If I can absorb even a few lessons from this book, my writing will improve dramatically.

I am an experienced freelance writer with dozens of articles and four books under my belt. Yet I was put off by the two opening chapters of this book because they jumped into details so quickly.

I really got turned on when I hit Part Two, and continued to learn, learn, learn from every chapter thereafter. I thought the Appendix: Punctuation an extremely valuable section.

This book is too complicated for beginning writers. But for those of us wanting to hone our skills, wanting to write with clarity and grace, this book is for us.

An "o" is missing from the word "to" on page 265, in the paragraph titled "Interruptions", last word in line 6.

After reading other books on how to organize a technical document, I read this one on how to make my writing more clear. My writing was "fuzzy" and my point was unintentionally hidden, and now, my sentences and paragraphs now say what I really mean. The lessons in this book help me think clearly - an unexpected result. The book does not dictate how I should write. It provides nifty techniques on how to quickly revise my writing for greater clarity. Also, its the first book that explains just what "clarity" is. Worth the money.

this (short) book is a must for any writer, whether fiction, nonfiction or academic. the ten lessons help to make your sentences easier to read and understand.