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Styleten lessons in clarity and gracebest-seller of writing improvement tips - plus exercises
Separate chapters deal with each of these issues in turn. He starts with a brief and amusing guide to bad prose and what creates it, and he ends with the most celebrated advice on creating effective prose - that good writing is about 'rewriting'. His general advice is that improvement can be made - if you go slowly. It's pitched at a fairly sophisticated level, suitable for intermediate to advanced users. Williams assumes that readers know the basics of what is right and wrong, but want to improve in matters of clarity and elegance. He makes an interesting and useful distinction between three types of correctness - and offers different levels of response to them. There are are exercises in each chapter with suggested answers, which I think makes this a text which might be more popular with tutors than with the students for whom it was presumably written. You've got to put up with a lot of grappling with 'nominalizations', 'resumptive modifiers', and elimination of the passive voice, as well as the same examples worked over and over until they're right. There's a particularly good chapter on deleting redundant expressions, writing more concisely, and eliminating 'metadiscourse' [signposting or 'writing about writing']. He gives one example where a fifty word statement is edited down to a sentence of six. His advice includes one point I write on something like fifty percent of all student essays: 'Put the subject at the start of the sentence, and follow it as soon as possible with the verb'. Towards the end of the book he tries to 'teach the unteachable' - elegance and 'good style'. This section requires quite a sophisticated level of literary experience, and strangely enough he ends on punctuation - but pitched at quite an advanced level. This isn't a book for beginners. It's for people who want to improve their existing writing skills, who want to rid themselves of officialese and cloudy abstraction and garbled syntax so as to produce writing which is clear and efficient. If you follow his advice, read carefully what he's got to say, and complete the exercises, I think you'll find it money well spent. © Roy Johnson 1999 [more STYLE GUIDE manuals] Joseph Williams, Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace, New York: Addison Wesley, (6th edn) pp.309, ISBN 0321024087
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