Product Description

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace reflects the wisdom and clear authorial voice of Williams best-selling book, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, while streamlining every chapter to create a very brief, yet powerfully direct guide to writing with style. The brevity and clarity of this book make it a quick and ideal read for freshman composition courses, as well as for writing courses across the disciplines. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace covers the elemental principles of writing that will help students diagnose their prose quickly and revise it effectively. The ten lessons feature principles of effective prose written in William's hallmark conversational style, offering reason-based approaches, rather than hard and fast rules, for successful, effective writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #370020 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author

Joseph M. Williams is a leading scholar in the discipline of composition.

Customer Reviews

Truly great, smaller but updated version of his bigger book
This smallish book summarizes and updates "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition)." I rank both books at least a "5 out of 5" ranking. I bought the "Style: Ten Lessons" book first and after reading his previous book, I wanted more from this author. This new book is a fitting treat; it is destined to be a classic in the field of writing.

This smaller 150 page book presents many easy-to-apply principles and, for me, were easier to understand.

The principles that I liked most were:

+ How nominalizations can be very good or very bad, depending on their purpose, or lack of it.
+ How to re-arrange sentences putting the new and most important ideas on the end; thus sometimes flipping the sentence around and making good use of the passive tense.
+ The importance of aligning the characters of your story with the subjects of your sentences, and using active verbs to make "interesting subjects do interesting things."
+ Why and how to keep the distance between subject, verb and object short.

There are many, many other writing principles that you will find very useful. Although this book is written for someone with writing experience, a beginner will also find it MOST helpful.

I recommend any budding writer to buy both books. The bigger, older book has more discussion. But I found this smaller, newer book easier to read and understand. I'm now reading his Craft of Research book, and it looks like a winner too.

This is an author whose books you should collect. He has become a highly recommended expert in the field of writing. Look at the reviews of the bigger book to see what others are saying. I am so happy that I found his books.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

Better than Strunk & White, better than Turabian
The longer version of Joseph Williams "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" has been justly praised for many years. But as a director of writing programs at NYU, Princeton, and Yale, I never felt right adopting that text: it was too expensive, and more than the average student needed. This "Basics" Style is the perfect solution. All the brilliance of the longer book at 1/3 the price, "Style" perfectly balances explanations of style rules with practical examples. The rules that Strunk and White encourage are good ones, and American prose would be leaner if their precepts were universal. The problem with that book is that the advice is not explained systematically. You can use their suggestions when you face similar cases, but only Williams' text breaks down topics like elegance, coherence, and cohesion in ways that will let you carry the ideas into every text you write. I would not recommend this book for the casual 10th grader; although it's clearly written, its ideas are somewhat advanced. But for professionals, college writers, and any teenager who takes writing seriously, "Style" is an indispensable tool, a book you'll use for the rest of your life. For learning to write good college papers, I also highly recommend his "Craft of Research."

How Style Ought to Be Taught
Teaching style is not an easy task. Just look at the number of books on the market that portend to do this task, and it becomes obvious that not all authors succeed in their efforts. Some manuals attempt to teach by rules, others by persuasion, and still others by example. This book takes all three approaches and illustrates that the art of stylistic writing is a matter of know-how. Unlike most books in the field, I find this one generally successful.

The book's method is heuristic. It begins with causes of bad writing, and progresses to clarity, cohesion, emphasis, coherence, concision, length, and elegance. Each principle is given a bad examples compared to a good one. Direct, subject-verb-object writing is extolled, and certain anathemas of other texts are approved under the right circumstances. While I disagree with one its principles: That it is acceptable to begin a sentence with "There" and "It," these are minor quibbles in an otherwise strongly argued case.

Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" now has a major competitor, and this book is it. Whether one writes in fiction or non-fiction, the principles and examples given throughout this book are to be commended. I know of one author, a philosopher, who took these principles to heart. What once was ambiguous and contorted writing is now lucid, clear, and vivid. If this book can make this kind of progress, I certainly recommend it to all writers.

While on the subject of good writing, I also recommend Corbett's "Classical Rhetoric" for those authors who want to write convincing arguments. One on style, the other on substance. While William's book on style will make prose more readable, Corbett's book will make it more intelligible.