Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace

by Joseph M. Williams

Engaging and direct, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is the guidebook for anyone who wants to write well.

Key Benefit

Engaging guidebook for anyone who wants to write well.

Key Topics

Style, Clarity, Grace, Form, Ethics Guidelines for writing.

Market:

General Interest: Improving writing

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference, Language, Education, Communication, Textbooks

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Juliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed the way I think about sentence structure, and I'm the type of girl who thinks about sentence structure all the time.

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brilliant little guide to improving your writing that I wish I had known about when I was an English teacher.

Williams begins with the basics and builds up to chapters on style and usage. The underlying themes throughout are two: Good writing is not limited to professional authors - anyone can do it with sufficient practice and a decent amount of concern about what you write; and the rules of grammar and syntax are guides to clear communication. Writers can "bend" and even break them in the interests of that communication.

Definitely recommended to anyone who writes (prose, poetry or nonfiction) and to those of us who edit them.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not too bad for an English textbook. My favorite parts are when Williams makes the very mistakes he chastises other writers for doing.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing is a difficult task (to say nothing of writing with a second language), no one is in more need of guidance and help than a writer who doesn’t know how to put her thoughts into words in a captivating and convincing way. “Style toward Clarity and Grace” can help, it is a thorough, elaborated yet comprehensible guide book on communicating complexity effectively and elegantly. The precursor of this book was a text book of writing for undergraduate students in US, which is to say this may not be the right book for everyone. A couple of things ESL learners may want to know before they pick up this book: it says little about grammar, nothing about choosing the right words and collocation; it is not a book on how to write correctly, but how to write well.
　　
　　This book consists of 8 parts: causes, clarity, cohesion, emphasis, coherence, concision, length, elegance and usage. At the very first beginning of the book, Mr.Williams shows us it is very difficult to write in a clear, precise and elegant style by providing examples of professional and educated writings that doesn’t measure up to this standard. After explaining why it is easy to fall short, he uses the following parts to deal with sentences construction and prose rendering: in parts that titled clarity, cohesion and emphasis Mr Williams teaches us skills from the basic level of constructing a sentence as readable and unequivocal to the advanced level of refining a sentence as graceful and powerful; in parts that titled coherence, concision and length he centers on ways of linking sentences smoothly and climatically, and then, on manners of unveiling sufficient evidence to entrance the readers rather than to stifle them; in the part titled elegance he talks about the whole presentation of writing as in how to write beautifully even poetically (the more advanced writing tools such as metaphor and rhythm are briefly mentioned in this part.)
　　
　　One of the things that makes this book great is that it doesn’t instill dogmas like other writing books always do, Mr Williams provides methods that can be used to make our writing clear and elegant at the same time empathizes the importance of maintaining our creativity and cultivating our own style. In the final part, Mr Williams introduces the idea that some grammar rules can be broken to best serve our writing.
　　
　　Reading this book was a journey that taught me the playfulness and fulfillment of writing, it not only helps me write better but also inspires me to write more.

[Joe S · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the tens of people out there who actually have to teach reading and writing, I've decided to start reviewing the heap of atrocious textbooks I've had to slog through while building my syllabi.

This book is brilliant. I feel like a better writer for having read it. I wish it had been required when I was taking first-year comp. It fucks the old-school conservativism of Strunk-n-White right in the ear. Williams sidesteps the paralyzing imperatives for pre- and mid-writing processes and skips right to rewriting, walking through the revision process on a sentence level. And not once does he say "you must" or "you must never" (two phrases that freeze freshman brains quicker than "pop quiz"). Instead, he basically says readers are monkeys who need help understanding. And here's how you lead those monkeys by the hand. Subtle change in focus, huge change in distribution of power.

Less one star for the omnipresent linguistic terms that even I didn't remember. I'm not quite sure it was absolutely necessary to refer so often to nominalizations and resumptive modifiers. Probably not so good for an ESL class. Or maybe even better. I'd never have known what the crunk a resumptive modifier was if I hadn't taken a foreign language.

[Patrick Garrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Rather Expensive Guide with Little Unique Content

Though well written--a prerequisite for a style book--I wasn't blown away by this guide's content. A required text for a rhetorical studies seminar at UC, Riverside, we compared this book with Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences to glean practical value from a spectrum of books that have the intention of distilling style into a couple hundred pages. The approach in this text comes in response to, and in some ways falls short of, the seminal Elements of Style. That is, presenting some fundamental rules, which claim to be more universal than others, and urging writers to adopt them judiciously. Tufte's approach, however, categorizing sentences broadly and provides many (my classmates thought too many) examples in each category--a stylistic immersion of a kind. If immersion isn't for you, and you're looking for a sort of check-list for grammar and style, I would suggest going with Elements of Style. If you've already read EOS, your looking for the same rules in a fresh voice, and you have a few bucks to spend, go ahead and buy this guide.

[Anna]

I especially appreciated lessons 6, 7, and 8.

[Matthew Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to read at times but useful

[Feng Ouyang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Style, Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Williams, Joseph M.; Bizup, Joseph.
1 Style as Choice
• Styles are not rules but choices.
• Writing rules are divided into grammatical rules (mandated) and style rules (optimal).
• An important set of modern rules are about gender pronouns. We appear to be modern when following these rules.
2 Clarity
2.1 Lesson 2 Actions (Sentence level)
• Identify the focus of your sentence: who does what. Make the focus the subject and action of your sentence.
• Avoid long, complex subject parts. Usually, that should not be your subject. For example, don’t say “the expectation of John is that,” but say “John expects that.”
• Avoid nominalization (nouns that represent actions). Use action verbs directly.
• However, nominalization can be useful when you want to make the action as subject (e.g., to connect with the last sentence for better flow or to focus on the fact that the action happened) or object, or when the nominalization words are familiar (such as request or examination).
2.2 Lesson 3 Characters
• This lesson continues with the last one in cleaning up the subject-action relationship.
• To clean up a complex sentence, you need to find ALL subjects involved. A sentence can have multiple subjects embedded in clauses and proposition phases. You need to pick the central one for the main sentence or use multiple sentences to place all of them.
• Often, the subject is missing from the original sentence (e.g., “Expectation of success is an important motivator.” It could mean “we are more motivated if we expect success.”). The writer needs to fill in the subject based on his best judgment or use passive voice.
• Inanimate things can also be subject. In the above example, it is OK to use expectation as a subject, except it is a nominalization to be avoided.
o You can also tell stories whose main characters are abstractions, even nominalizations. All things being equal, you should prefer concrete characters. But there are circumstances when a more abstract version of a story is better.
• Avoid excessive abstractions that could bury the real focal points.
o Most readers want the subjects of verbs to name flesh-and-blood characters. But often, you must write about abstractions. When you do, turn them into virtual characters by making them the subjects of verbs that tell a story. If readers are familiar with your abstractions, no problem. But when they are not, avoid using many other abstract nominalizations around them. When you revise an abstract passage, you may have a problem if the hidden characters are “people in general.” Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, English offers no good way to name a generic “doer.” Try a general term for whoever is doing the action, such as researchers, social critics, one, and so on. If that won’t work, try “we.”
• Possible reasons for using passive voice:
o The readers do not need to know or care about the actor.
o Avoid “first-person” descriptions to make it sound more objective (“The work was evaluated” vs. “I evaluated the work”).
o A smoother movement from the last sentence (starting with the last thing mentioned before)
o Provide a more consistent and appropriate point of view: the same thing that receives multiple actions
• Metadiscourse is the text that revers not to a writer’s subject matter but to the writer, the reader, or the writing itself. It deviates from the main thread of writing. While metadiscourse should not be used excessively, it is often used even in scholarly papers, especially in introductions and conclusions, where the writer would wish to be more personal. Here are some examples
o To explain your thinking or writing: In this paper, we will argue/claim/ show...; I conclude from these data that...
o To trace logic or form of your argument: First...; In addition...; Most important...; Consequently...
o To address your readers: As you recall...; Consider...
o To describe the organization of your document: This paper is divided into three parts…; Our arguments proceed as follows…
o To refer to other parts of your document: In the passage above...; As demonstrated by Figure 1...
o To express a stance or point of view: Not unexpectedly...; We concur that...; It seems unlikely that...
o To hedge or intensify your argument: usually, perhaps, seems, in some respects...; very, clearly, certainly... (I discuss hedges and intensifiers more in Lesson 8.)
• Using first-person instead of passive voice is more appropriate in metadiscourses.
• Long noun sequences, although sometimes necessary and concise, make sentences dense. They can be changed by adding relational propositions or converting them to subject-action pairs.
• Shorter subjects (as opposed to long phrases or subclauses) make the sentences easier to understand. They provide a center for the reader to know the focus of the sentence.
2.3 Lesson 4 Cohesion and Coherence
• Cohesion means a smooth flow between sentences. It works well by the “old to new” principle.
o Start with the information that the reader already knows (mentioned in the last sentence or familiar in general).
o End with new information
o Start with simple concepts and end with more complex ones
o You need to balance sentence clarity (e.g., avoiding passive voices) with the need for cohesion, which requires ordering the sentence parts in a certain way. If you must tradeoff, favor cohesion.
• Coherence is about a group of sentences forming a whole picture. An example of an incoherent passage would be a paragraph written by different people; each only knows the previous sentence. The text may flow well from sentence to sentence but does not provide anything meaningful as a whole.
o A reader wishes to grasp the topic of each sentence or clause quickly and see how the topics are connected over multiple sentences. Note that topics are not necessarily grammatical subjects, although it is a good idea for clarity to make the topic the subject.
o One way to keep the focus is using the same topic for a sequence of sentences. For example, when discussing how to write for clarity, we can use “readers” as the common topic when addressing several concepts instead of making these concepts as subjects.
o You should also put the topic at the beginning of the sentence so a reader can easily spot it. At the same time, a sentence should start with concepts or topics that are familiar (by common knowledge or by previous mentions) to the reader (cohesiveness).
o In a paragraph, the topics should form a small set of related ideas (coherence).
o To identify topics you should use, imagine giving the paragraph a title. Words contained in the title are candidates for topics in the paragraph.
• Beginning a sentence with topic words is not always easy. We tend to start a sentence with metadiscourses that link to the previous ones or introduce modifiers to limit or predicate our statements. [However, I often feel that the metadiscourses and predicates are more important than the topic and should lead the sentences.]
• Don’t sacrifice consistency and focus for the sake of variety. Don’t vary sentence structures so that the topics are obscured in some sentences. Don’t change the words in topics for diversity because consistent wording helps a reader spot the common subject.
• Cohesion and coherence are about making text easier to understand when it introduces new information and concepts. This task is difficult because the writer is already familiar with the subject and cannot identify with a reader who may have difficulty understanding. Careful and conscious editing is necessary.
• Be careful when using connecting devices such as “therefore,” “however,” etc., to ensure they reflect the correct logical relationships. Otherwise, these words may create faked coherence. Spare words such as and, also, moreover, another, and so on because they are often not necessary when listing multiple things.
• Summary of the Tips
o Place the subject as close as possible to the beginning of the sentence. Start with old and familiar information and lead to new and unfamiliar ones.
o In a paragraph, use a small set of closely related topics. When necessary, use a common topic (such as the researcher or the report) to connect the disparate concepts involved.
2.4 Lesson 5 Emphasis
• Once we place the subject and actions, we continue to discuss the orders and positions of the rest of the sentence.
• A sentence is easier to understand if it progresses from simple to complex components. Complexity is based on grammatical structures and/or terms (such as unfamiliar technical terms).
• End a sentence with emphases, which is usually the new information. This practice requires trimming the unnecessary phases at the end (e.g., those already implied by the rest of the sentence). The rule may require moving some sentence parts to the beginning, which is a tradeoff with the earlier rules of starting with subject and action.
• Six ways for emphasizing
1. Use “empty words” such as “there is …” to begin a sentence to shift the stress to a later position. This is a tradeoff with the clarity rule against using empty words as subjects.
2. Use passive voice to put the actor in a later position.
3. Use “what we need is…” to emphasize the real target. This is similar to the first way.
4. Use “It” as a placeholder for the actual subject: “It seems that inevitable that …” This is again similar to the first way. But it has the added advantage of making the sentence head-light.
5. Use “not only, but also” instead of “and” to stress the latter item. Note that this is discouraged by the “Grammarly” tool.
6. If you need to end a sentence with a word used before, try to replace it with a pronoun or just omit it. Otherwise, the reader will have a mental voice drop at the end, and the intended stress would be lost.
• Emphasizing in a paragraph. To make a paragraph more consistent and understandable, we should stick with a few topic words and use them to construct all sentences. These topic words should be emphasized in the topic sentence (the first sentence), so the reader is clear about the focus of the paragraph.
3 Clarity of Form
This part is about organizing the entire documents.
3.1 Lesson 6 Framing Documents
This lesson discusses introductions and conclusions.
o The functions of an introduction are 1) tell readers what to expect (what); 2) motivate readers to read it (so what). Be careful, do not assume readers already know as much as the author about the structure and importance.
o An introduction can use the following format: shared context, problem, solution/main point/claim.
 The shared context is widely acceptable facts, values, or experiences
• In an academic paper, the shared context can be several paragraphs in the form of a literature review. However, in other documents, it can be much shorter.
• Sometimes people introduce the common context and then challenges it, opening the essay.
 Problem: the specific topic to be addressed.
• A problem includes a situation and its consequence.
• A problem can be either conceptual or practical. The former usually takes more explanation.
 Solution: proposal: what we should do and/or what we should think.
o Prelude: another part of the introduction. It can be a quotation, an anecdote, a striking fact, etc. It is used to grab initial attention.
o The inclusion and extension of these parts depend on the presumed reader’s knowledge about the topic.
o There should be a clear division of the three parts in the introduction. For example, use “but” or “however” to transition from shared context to the problem.
o Put the solution or claim to the end of the introduction for emphasis.
o Clearly signal the end of the introduction.
o Conclusions contain three parts: summary, significance, and further thoughts.
3.2 Lesson 7 Framing Sections
Section means section, subsection, or a group of paragraphs. They are a part of the whole document.
o Make the readers clear on the section structure
o Signal the beginning and end of a section, either by subtitles or by some transition sentences.
o Provide a short segment that introduces the section. The introduction should announce the section theme, tied to the claims or statements forecasted in the document introduction.
o In the body of the section, use the concepts announced in the introduction to organize the section and repeat them regularly.
o The introduction part of a section should include the topic terms of the paragraph.
o Make the readers clear on each part of the section
o Clarify how each piece of information relates to the points of the section. It can be background, point itself, supporting reasons or facts, explanation of how reasons and facts support the point or consideration of other points of view.
o Clarify how parts of the document are organized. The organization can be chronological, logical, or coordinating.
o Each paragraph, which can be long or short depending on the genre, contains an introduction part that outlines the framing (why the paragraph is here), the points, and how you plan to make the points. Make sure your main point appears at either the beginning or end of the paragraph.
o In general, a writing unit is easier to understand if it begins with a short and easy segment that frames the longer and more complex segments that follow. This principle applies to sentences, paragraphs, sections, and documents.
The tradeoff of templated writing
• When following the rules outlined in this part of the book, some authors may question these rules’ necessity and feel they suppress creativity.
• The templates help the readers to follow the points. In most cases, the readers are looking for easily accessible information instead of creativity. So they will be grateful if the document follows a predictable pattern.
• Although we, as writers, are conscious of the rules we must follow, the readers may not feel it is unnatural.
• As another book said, it is OK to break the rules sometimes, especially when your large-scale structure is good but some sentences or paragraphs are less conforming. However, you need to show you understand the rules before getting the freedom to violate them.
4 Grace
4.1 Lesson 8 Concision
Concision is about compacting writing and avoiding wasted words. More compact writing is easier to understand and more powerful. We can perform the following editing to achieve concision:
• Delete meaningless “helper” words: kind of, actually, particular, really, certain, various, virtually, individual, basically, generally, given, practically, etc.
• Delete doubled “duplicated” works: full and complete, hope and trust, any and all, true and accurate, each and every, basic and fundamental, hope and desire, first and foremost, various and sundry. These pairs sound more learned, but they don’t add to the meaning.
• Delete what is implied: predict future events, completely revolutionary, past history, final outcome, unexpected surprise, period of time, gray in color, dull in appearance, etc.
• Replace a phrase with a word: improve writing -> edit, the thing to do before anything else -> first, use X instead of Y -> replace, sequences of subjects and verbs ->clauses, the same ideas expressed in nouns -> nominalization, the reason for -> why, despite the fact that -> even though, in the event -> if, in a situation where -> when, concerning the matter of -> about, there is a need for -> must, in a position to -> can, prior to -> before
• Change negatives to affirmatives
• Remove redundant metadiscourses (phases that indicate where the discussion is going instead of the discussion itself, such as I believe, as you can see, etc.) They are useful, but too many of them dilute the content.
• Hedges and intensifiers. Removing hedges effectively intensifies the statements. Note that words like obviously, no doubt, may have the opposite effect on the readers, suggesting that the statements are not absolutely credible.
Note that all these edits for concision change the voice of the sentences. So make sure the effect is intended.
4.2 Lesson 9: Shape
This lesson is about how to write long sentences that are easy to grasp.
• Start with your point. Not only do we want to put subject and action at the beginning, but also we should start with the main logical point. That probably means that the subject and action of the sentence should align with our main logical point. The “point first” principle also applies to paragraphs, sections, and documents.
• Avoid starting with a long subclause and get to the subject quickly. Try to move the subclauses to a later position.
• Avoid long subject subclause so a reader can get to the verb and object quickly.
• Avoid interruptions within the subject-verb-object flow.
• Put new and complex information at the end of a sentence.
• Avoid cascading explanation subclauses (sprawl). Try to use other forms such as present participles or break them down into separate sentences. Another way is changing the cascading modifying clauses into parallel modifiers separated by commas.
• In a parallel list, place the short terms before long terms.
• Be careful about grammatical “bugs.”
o Parallels must have the same grammatical structure. For example, don’t list a phrase and a subclause, or a phase and an adverb, as parallels.
o Be careful about connecting words and their logical implications. For example, “and” is for parallel items, not progression ideals.
o Use repeated words instead of pronouns if the pronoun references could be confusing.
o Watch out for confusing pairing of modifiers and what they modify. A more severe case is the dangling modifier, whose grammatical object is not the intended one.
On the other hand, a straightforward sentence is not always the style choice, in my view. Sometimes a slow start provides suspense that piques the reader’s interest. You may also want to slow the reader down to force deliberation.
4.3 Lesson 10 Elegance
This section discusses some techniques for enhancing the impact and power of the text.
• Balance means having corresponding parts in a sentence or parallel components.
o Coordinate balance is components linked by thins like “and,” “but,” “not only, but also,” etc. The parallel parts are not only symmetrical in meaning but also in sound and length.
o Noncoordinate balance correlates parts that are not grammatically equivalent. The parts are tied together in various ways by rhythm, rhyme, structure, etc.
• Emphasis: we can bring weight to the end of the sentence and thus make the sentence more powerful in several ways.
o Weighty words. End the sentence with words that carry more weight. Usually, nouns or nominalizations have more weight. This is a good reason for a

[Omar Halabieh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently finished reading Style - The Basics of Clarity and Grace - by Joseph M. Williams.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

When we don't know what we're talking about (or have no confidence in what we do know) we typically write long sentences choked with abstract words.

I suspect that those who choose to observe all the rules all the time do so not because they think they are protecting the integrity of the language or the quality of our culture, but because they want to assert a style of their own.

We began with two principles: •Make central characters subjects of verbs. • Use verbs to name the actions those characters are involved in.

Most readers prefer subjects of verbs to name the main characters in your story, and those main characters to be flesh-and-blood characters. When you write about concepts, however, you can turn them into virtual characters by making them the subjects of verbs that communicate actions.

Your readers want you to use the end of your sentences to communicate two kinds of difficulty: long and complex phrases and clauses; and new information, particularly unfamiliar technical terms.

Five Principles of Concision: 1. Delete words that mean little or nothing. 2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words. 3. Delete words implied by other words. 4. Replace a phrase with a word. 5. Change negatives to affirmatives.

A highly recommended read in the area of writing.

[Ksenia Anske · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book to buy to have in your reference library, along with The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style. Though you'll find it mostly discussing non-fiction examples, the lessons are the same. You can apply them to any writing, fiction included. And you'll chuckle, too, recognizing your own ineptnesses described so eloquently here, and with such fine humor (especially when you get to the last chapter that includes a brief history of good English and the separation of real grammatical rules from mere linguistic folklore insisted upon by purists but ignored by all good writers).

[Jessy Reese]

Helpful but not fun

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's helpful, if not a little tedious at some points, but it wasn't the worst nonfiction reference book I've been required to read for a class.

Even though it offered good insight and tips, I wish the font wasn't so small. I tried to increase font size, only to discover that the feature isn't offered. It also doesn't allow text-to-speech which further dampened my reading experience.

[Sâmbouan Darius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains only the bare essentials for improving writing style. It talks about clarity, coherence, conciseness, and elegance, and it also provides plenty of examples to work with, plus some basic grammar applied to writing. I don’t know if I would recommend it. It did help me a little, but I’m sure there are much better books on writing style.

[A Crawley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Game changer for your writing— it's a lethal weapon. The book teaches how to craft power sentences with ease. I believe it's one of those books that can be life changing. It was for me. It can be for you.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was super interesting and taught me a lot. Already applying what I learned in my work.

[Jonathon Crump · Rating 5 out of 5]

So helpful. The best book on style I’ve read. Reading this has made me a better writer.

[Natalie Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh I wish I had read this book during undergrad, it would have saved me so much pain!

[Austin Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned a lot from this about developing my prose. Many pages exposed me of writing poorly. We will see how successful Mr. Williams was in the spring semester with its many papers.

[Demetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the crowded republic of advice books, “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace” is a small, sternly generous volume that behaves less like a handbook than like a lucid conversation with a demanding teacher. Joseph M. Williams, writing out of the University of Chicago’s tradition of taking prose seriously as a civic instrument, sets himself against two temptations that dominate most style talk: piety and pedantry. He is impatient with moralizing about “good writing” that never explains how to do it, and equally impatient with rule-lists that treat prose as a set of superstitions to be obeyed for their own sake.

Those sentences announce the book’s ambition and its stubborn limits. Williams wants to make the invisible labor of reading visible enough that a writer can anticipate it – and revise in response. But he is also writing a book whose own ideal is a kind of transparency: if the prose is doing its job, you should not feel it performing. This is a paradox that “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace” navigates with more success than swagger. It is not a book that asks to be loved. It asks to be used.

Part of its authority comes from its modesty about what it can and cannot deliver. Williams does not promise you a “voice,” nor does he flatter you with the fantasy that a few tricks will turn prose into personality. What he promises is the more difficult thing: control – not control as domination, but as the ability to predict the effects of choices you are already making. In that sense the book is closer in spirit to a laboratory manual than to a sermon. It offers hypotheses about what readers do, then trains you to see the symptoms that appear when prose ignores those habits of mind.

The structure is brisk and almost suspiciously orderly: ten chapters moving from diagnosis to repair, from the causes of turgid prose to its remedies, from sentence-level clarity to paragraph-level coherence and, finally, to the graces of elegance and the hard, unglamorous ethics of usage. The table of contents reads like a syllabus for a course that expects you to do the work: “Causes,” “Clarity,” “Cohesion,” “Emphasis,” “Coherence I” and “Coherence II” (the two chapters coauthored with Gregory G. Colomb), then “Concision,” “Length,” “Elegance,” and “Usage.”

That last word, “usage,” is an important tell. Many books about style end in uplift, as if clarity were a personal virtue that needs only encouragement. Williams ends in convention – in the social realities of language, where readers judge writers not only by what they say but by how they signal membership, care, and competence. This is one reason the book continues to feel current even though it first appeared in 1990: its subject is not fashion but friction, the small resistances that accumulate between a writer’s intentions and a reader’s understanding.

The opening chapter, “Causes,” is Williams at his most diagnostic and, sometimes, at his most relentlessly managerial. He refuses the romantic explanation that bad prose results from bad souls. Instead he locates opacity where many professionals actually live: in institutions that reward caution; in disciplines that confuse complexity with profundity; in the defensive habits writers learn when they fear being wrong; in the pressure to sound like the tribe in order to be admitted to it. The chapter’s effect is to make “bad style” feel less like a personal failing than like a predictable byproduct of certain kinds of work – and therefore, potentially, something you can unlearn.

Then comes the book’s central demonstration: “Clarity.” Williams’s most influential prescription, one that has been absorbed into the bloodstream of good editing, is to look for a sentence’s characters and actions and to put them where readers expect to find them. It is, in essence, a theory of attention. Readers locate who or what a sentence is about in its subjects, and they locate what is happening in its verbs. When writers bury action in nouns, or let their verbs go slack with empty helpers, they force readers to reconstruct the story from fragments, as though reading were a puzzle meant to test endurance.

Here Williams introduces one of his signature terms, “nominalization,” and if the word itself feels like the sort of jargon he claims to dislike, he anticipates the objection by making the concept earn its keep. Nominalizations, he argues, are not merely ugly – they are the mechanism by which writers hide action and, often, responsibility. His technique is to make the hidden verb reappear, not as a stylistic flourish, but as a restoration of meaning: “The police conducted an investigation” becomes “The police investigated.”

At its best, “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace” makes you feel that revising a sentence is not cosmetic. It is an act of honesty. Williams’s examples show how easily institutional prose evacuates agency – how “a review was done” replaces “they reviewed,” how “a need exists” replaces “we need,” how a writer can smuggle vagueness into the very grammar of a clause. The book does not preach about accountability; it makes unaccountable sentences embarrass themselves.

If “Clarity” is the book’s best-known chapter, “Cohesion” is its most quietly radical. It shifts attention from the individual sentence to the chain of sentences – the way a paragraph persuades a reader that it is going somewhere. Williams distinguishes between logical relationships (which may exist in the writer’s mind) and visible connections (which must exist on the page). Readers rely on patterns: familiar information near the beginnings of sentences, new and emphatic information near their ends, a sense that one sentence grows out of the last rather than landing like an unrelated brick. Cohesion, in this view, is not decoration; it is the architecture of comprehension.

“Emphasis,” which follows, is where Williams begins to sound like a pragmatist with a poet’s suspicion of accidents. He argues that importance is a function of position: readers tend to grant the end of a sentence its heaviest weight, whether the writer intended it or not. If you do not control emphasis, you may inadvertently elevate a trivial detail and bury the point you care about. The advice here can feel almost too simple – move the important words toward the end, clear space around the stress – but that simplicity is the point. Readers do not consult a style guide as they read. They respond to structure.

The two “Coherence” chapters, coauthored with Gregory G. Colomb, are the book’s most technical and, for some readers, its most testing. They insist that coherence is not a mystical property but a set of effects produced by patterns. They admit, almost apologetically, that they have had to create terms for new concepts about coherence and that these principles are more abstract than those about subjects and verbs. But they also stress that what they offer are diagnostic tools, not commandments – ways to anticipate when readers might feel lost and to revise accordingly.

Their apparatus – topic strings, thematic strings, predictable placements for new information, the expectation that a coherent paragraph will state its point clearly and place that point where readers look for it – can feel, at first, like being asked to diagram an instinct. Yet if you stay with it, the payoff is real. You begin to see that many “unclear” paragraphs are not unclear because the sentences are hard, but because the paragraph keeps changing its subject without warning. The writer knows what connects the sentences; the reader does not. Coherence, the chapters insist, is not what you meant. It is what you made available.

If the coherence chapters lean toward system, “Concision” leans toward scruple. Williams resists the crude commandment “shorter is better.” He is too honest about the realities of explanation for that. His point is subtler: remove what does no work for the reader. Concision is not a style – it is a relationship, a promise not to waste attention. The book’s best moments are those in which Williams suggests, without sentimentalizing, that attention is a moral resource. A writer spends it; a reader pays it.

It is in “Length” that Williams takes a risk many contemporary style guides avoid: he defends long sentences. Not all length is indulgence. Sometimes a complex idea needs a long shape, provided the sentence carries its readers with it, clause by clause, with its logic exposed rather than implied. In a culture that has turned “tight” into a moral adjective, Williams’s willingness to say “long” without apology feels almost refreshing. His deeper claim is that length is never the issue – structure is. A long sentence that reveals its scaffolding can be easier than a short one that hides its logic behind abstractions.

By the time we arrive at “Elegance,” the reader may suspect that Williams is about to loosen his tie, to offer permission for flourish. He does not. His idea of elegance is not decoration but balance: the feeling that a sentence’s form matches the relations among its ideas. He is attentive to parallelism and symmetry, but wary of anything that calls attention to itself. The elegant sentence, in this view, is the one whose labor is concealed – not because it is effortless, but because it is well distributed.

Finally comes “Usage,” a chapter that might seem like an anticlimax, a return to the schoolroom after the freedoms of thought. But Williams is too intelligent to treat usage as mere policing. He treats it as social negotiation: conventions that allow strangers to understand one another and that allow writers to be judged on their ideas rather than on avoidable distractions. He is also shrewd about the politics of correctness: how “rules” harden out of preferences, how some forms become markers of class and education, how writers are often punished not for being unclear but for being legible in the wrong dialect. Usage, in Williams’s hands, becomes another form of reader-awareness, another site where grace either exists or fails.

If this all sounds relentlessly reasonable, that is because Williams’s mind is relentlessly reasonable. The book’s best quality is its refusal to mystify writing. It does not promise genius; it promises craft. It does not claim that you will write beautifully; it claims that you can write so that readers will not stumble over your meaning. There is a kind of stern kindness in that promise. It assumes, quietly, that readers deserve to be carried.

But the book is not without its costs. Its confidence in diagnosis sometimes tilts toward a confidence that the diagnosable is what matters most. Writers of fiction and poetry – and even critics, when they are being honest – know that opacity can be chosen, that difficulty can be a form of truth, that the reader’s stumbling is sometimes part of the encounter. Williams’s framework can accommodate this in theory, but it does not linger there. The examples come largely from academic and bureaucratic prose, where the aim is almost always to reduce friction. For readers who care about prose that sometimes wants to create friction – the sentence that delays, haunts, or refuses to resolve – Williams can feel, at moments, like a benevolent administrator explaining how to keep the hallways clear.

There is also, in the coherence chapters, a faint risk of over-instrumentation. Topic strings and thematic strings can be a revelation; they can also become a template that tempts writers to engineer paragraphs so thoroughly that they lose the natural variability of thought. The authors warn against treating principles as rules, but writers who hunger for rules may do precisely that. The book’s discipline can become, in the wrong hands, another kind of stiffness – a new form of turgid virtue, dressed up as correctness.

Still, these are the complaints one makes about a serious tool: it does not fit every hand, and it can be misused. The larger truth is that Williams has written a book that continues to earn its place on desks because it teaches a repeatable form of attention. After you have read it, you begin to hear your own prose as your reader must. You notice when your subjects are not characters, when your verbs refuse to act, when your paragraph forgets what it promised, when your emphasis lands on the wrong word. You begin to feel, in your own drafts, the places where a reader would hesitate, and you learn to treat that hesitation not as an insult but as information.

It is tempting, in a review like this, to praise the book for being clear. That would be like praising a bridge for not collapsing. The more interesting praise is that “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace” makes clarity feel like something you can deliberately build rather than something you either possess or do not. It teaches you to read your drafts with useful suspicion: the first version of a sentence is usually a private note to yourself, not yet an offering to someone else. Revision becomes, in Williams’s account, not an admission of failure but a continuation of thinking – the moment when you finally decide what your reader must not be forced to guess.

In that respect, the book stands as a quiet corrective to the better-known tradition of style advice represented by “The Elements of Style,” with its aphorisms and prohibitions, or the journalistic confidence of “On Writing Well.” Williams is not against rules so much as he is against rule-worship. He wants a writer to understand why a rule might exist, what readerly problem it tries to solve, and what happens when you ignore that problem. His version of freedom is not permission to do anything; it is the ability to do what you intend, and to know what your reader is likely to do in response.

For all its sobriety, the book has a quiet charisma. Williams is not charming in the way of the stylist-as-celebrity; he is charming in the way of a mind that respects its reader. He does not flatter you with easy tricks. He assumes you can bear complexity, and insists you should not impose unnecessary complexity on others. He offers methods, but he also offers a stance: you write well when you write with the reader in mind, and you revise well when you are willing to sacrifice the sentence you love for the sentence your reader can follow.

On balance, I would place “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace” at 79 out of 100: a rigorous, durable guide whose best lessons are not slogans but habits of mind, and whose severity is, finally, a kind of respect.

[Drew Perron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace is not a bad book, as books on how to write good English go. It's got a lot of advice, clearly laid-out, and if you follow its teachings, your words will be understandable and get your point across. But it's got a deeper goal here, a meaningful purpose - one that it's too conservative to accomplish.

That's small-c conservative - not in the sense of a political party, but in the sense of being overcautious, having trouble accepting or adjusting to change. The writers want to push past the strict, inflexible rulesets of the past, with their long lists of dos and don'ts that set an arbitrary standard but don't help communication in the slightest; they want to give real, understandable reasons why you would or would not want to use a word, a phrase, a form of sentence or paragraph or document; they want to explain what makes some writing difficult to understand, and other writing lyrical and flowing, and give you the tools to make your writing more like the latter than the former. And to some extent, they succeed - don't get me wrong, there is a lot of useful material in here. But the writers don't realize that they themselves are still clinging to arbitrary standards, still passing them on implicitly and explicitly.

There are so many places where Style pushes against traditional bugaboos. The idea that shorter sentences are necessarily better is taken apart; rules like "nouns shouldn't modify nouns" and "no dangling modifiers" are shown to have no weight in English as it is spoken and written; different ways to design topics are given equal weight and affirmed as equally valuable in different circumstances, with examples taken from great historical luminaries. But there are so many places where the authors not only affirm a linguistic prejudice, they do so without any given reason, confidently declaring that certain words, phrases, methods of speaking, are Just Wrong, Not Proper English, an obvious affront on decent communication. The worst example is in chapter seven, "Concision", where a whole panoply of expression and idiom is dismissed as redundant or meaningless with very little discussion - yet, in the same chapter, subjects like "Excessive Detail" or "Hedges and Emphatics" are worthy of spending pages talking about why one might want to use a specific style (you know, the thing the book is about) even though it's not Concise.

And this is the place that really shows the central problem with the book. "Concision" begins by talking about how to cut meaningless words from an example sentence. Among the things that they cut are the words "in my opinion", and the reason given is that "any statement is implicitly opinion". But in a book like this, an instructional, educational tome adapted from a school textbook, statements are implicitly fact. And if you don’t take steps to sort out the differences between your opinions, which don't need to be justified, and your factual statements, which do, you end up with exactly the kind of arbitrary rules which this book is pushing against.

The goal that Style is reaching for is valuable, and if it cannot reach it, it is at least a step along the path to it. There's a drive here, a meaningful purpose towards making the world better, summed up best, I think, in a paragraph at the end of chapter four, "Emphasis":

"Some teachers of writing want to make voice a moral choice between a false voice and the voice 'authentic'. I suspect that we all speak in many voices, no one of which is more or less false, more or less authentic than any other. When you want to be pompous and authoritative, then that's in the voice you project because that's what you are being. When you want to be laconic and direct, then you should be able to adopt that voice. The problem is to hear the voice you are projecting and to change it when you want to. That's no more false than choosing how you dress, how you behave, how you live."

[Krys · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as style books go, this is one of the best I’ve read. It’s focus on how language is actually used versus stuffy grammar rules speaks volumes for how the teaching of writing has changed since I was in school.

The book is repetitive, only have one or two real points, constantly circles back on providing different ways of looking at the same principles depending on what aspect of a piece of work you are writing or revising. Those points, such as lead with short and simple and end with long and complex, were incredibly well-reasoned and clear for non-professional writers. I also enjoyed the defense of passive voice in a few particular instances.

But in addition to its repetition, the book also made use of example sentences that worked against the points of the lesson. and the final chapters got so far into the weeds that I can’t imagine students reading this book would learn much, discussions on coordination, for example. Either you already coordinate intuitively and the book will only point out what you do most of the time anyway, or you get lost in all the sentence diagrams and it won’t be much help.

Despite my criticisms, however, the early chapters really do provide good advice, especially for folks writing reports for their job who might need some help writing clearly.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of this book makes it sound as though it is full of flowery banality. When she first saw the book, my wife clasped it to her chest and sighed at the ceiling like an exaggerated Victorian. And yet, and mercifully, the text is spirited and punchy with a great deal of wit. Williams's argument boils down to "you should write as you would be written to," and the remainder is composed of 'lessons' complete with detailed instruction and concrete examples. The examples do make the crisp writing sag, but they have their purpose. I can testify to the book's helpfulness, at least in small matters, in that I re-wrote the majority of the sentences in this review at least once to better conform to Williams's precepts (if I have failed tremendously, it's my fault rather than his. All teachers recognize the student ignoring advice carefully given).
In short, any writer who introduces his glossary with a selection of quotes is worth your admiration. If you're trying to improve your own writing or want a cheap, useful and easy-reading text for a classroom, this one will do the job.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended by a dear friend. It arrived today via snail mail and appears to have had a good, long life in the Trinity Western Library. How I wish they would have left the card and card holder in the back jacket of the book. I was pleasantly surprised to read Elaine Chaika's name in the acknowledgments (page XV). As the author, J.M.Williamson points out, this is not the kind of book to be taken in at one sitting or even two. That is fine with me because, it gives me a chance to ponder each lesson at my own pace. More importantly, it provides me with the opportunity to mull over the concepts and make the lessons my own. Thank you Elaine. I am loving it.

Btw, Elaine; I have taken in your latest post on the "r" pronunciation and my eyes are still crossed. I felt like a mouth breather when I was done with that one. I am not worried however because complicated material has the same effect on me as time has on the fermenting grape; there's wine in them thar grapes.

[Jo Deurbrouck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yum, grammar porn! I could watch Williams parse beautiful, grammatically sophisticated sentences all day long. I also appreciate his easy refreshers for concepts like 'nominalization,' 'summative clause,' and the difference between coherence and cohesion. These things only stay fresh in my mind if I take myself back to school now and then. Some reviewers have dinged the man for being a less-than-graceful writer from time to time. This doesn't detract from the book's value for me. What would, I think, if I had read them, were the exercises. I have no interest in reading bad writing for the sole purpose of practicing ways to improve it. I believe a fine-tuned ear comes from what you read. I skipped all of the exercises, wishing all the while that Williams had taken the Francine Prose approach, giving me page after page of lovely examples I could wallow in instead of messes he thought I'd enjoy cleaning up.

[Marc Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read only one book to improve how you write, edit, and read English prose, then in my opinion, it should be this book by Joseph Williams. This is not a book for the uninitiated. Rather, this is a book for experienced writers who are unhappy with how they write, and are flailing around looking for some way to improve their writing. It is all in here; the history of how the English language assimilated multiple words, with different origins, that have similar or identical meanings; how obtuse, and turgid, academic writing became in the interest of appearing erudite; and of course, how you can cut, slash, and burn, your own sentences so that they leap off the page in a way that the reader effortlessly absorbs your meaning, intent and thoughts. Williams is phenomenal in his deep understanding of what makes poor writing awful, and what makes good writing delightful.

[Ian Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't know how I actually bumped into this great book, I guess I was just fortunate when I fortuitously picked the right book that accidentally mentioned it. I wonder why I was never introduced to it when attending university 'cause it not only clarifies plenty of practical and fundamental knowledge about writing in English (or rewriting, quoting the author) but helps a great deal when you want to rephrase a more complex sentence and make it less impersonal and obscure, especially when the materials are offered - those you read in textbooks or professional writing - by someone who isn't capable of writing in a clearer and simpler way. I genuinely believe this book will make a great, life-time companion as my reading and writing experience grows with time.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were a lot of relevant writing issues in this book and I felt like it did a good job of explaining the different concepts to make writing sound better and clearer. Every chapter featured a different aspect of writing that could be improved. I knew that I did a lot of things this book said were common mistakes and it was nice to see how clunky and cluttered it made writing and how I could fix it. This book helped my writing and offered tips and ways to change my writing to make it more graceful and elegant. I would recommend this book.

*Taken from my book reviews blog: http://reviewsatmse.blogspot.com/2010...

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this book for a writing class I took called, "Writing, Technology, and Style." Despite some places where I felt where Williams went into too much detail, I thoroughly enjoyed his chapter on usage because it was just another tally mark of books that I've read that talk about how teaching nothing but grammar to students actually makes them worse writers. Again, there were quite a few chapters in this book that I glossed over because some of the things Williams was saying were too complicated, but on the whole, I really enjoyed this book.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

What began as required reading in one of my classes quickly became a staple. I gave it 3 stars simply because this is not light reading nor is it the kind of book anyone (at least I hope)wants to read in one sitting. Rather, I would recommend taking a chapter at a time, giving the concepts time to take root. Guaranteed to improve your writing.