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Style – ten lessons in clarity and grace

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to refine your writing style

This is a twenty year old book already in its sixth edition, and the author admits that it’s still ‘evolving’, which is a good sign that serious thought is going into its composition. Style ten lessons in clarity and grace is based on a course Joseph Williams teaches at the University of Chicago. His approach is based on two principles – that ‘it’s good to write clearly, and anyone can’ – and the second part of the proposition is what he’s teaching here. His approach is to draw attention to the finer issues of clarity in prose, and to show how language can be used with subtelty to effect it.

Style ten lessons in clarity and grace His ten seperate chapters deal with each of these issues in turn, and his own prose style is engaging and friendly – which both proves his point and shows that he knows what he is talking about. 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. So what then are his ten ‘lessons’?

  1. Write with readers in mind
  2. Write clearly
  3. Write concretely
  4. Write in an active mode
  5. Put the subject at start of sentence
  6. Put rhetoric at end of sentence
  7. Edit, edit, edit; and cut, cut, cut
  8. Get the verb in the main clause
  9. Create structure
  10. Write ethically

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 2000

Style ten lessons in clarity and grace   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Style ten lessons in clarity and grace   Buy the book at Amazon US


Joseph Williams, Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace, New York: Addison Wesley, (6th edn) 1999, pp.309, ISBN: 0321024087


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Filed Under: Creative Writing, Journalism, Writing Skills, Writing Skills Tagged With: Creative writing, Writing guides, Writing skills, Writing style

The Elements of Style

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling short guide to good writing style

This style guide is a well-loved American classic. It was originally written during the first world war by William Strunk who was then a professor at Cornell, and it has since been updated to its third edition by E.B.White, one of his former pupils. You might wonder why it’s still in print and just as popular as ever. The answer is obvious to anyone who has ever opened a book on grammar in search of solutions to common writing problems.

The Elements of StyleStrunk’s clever strategy was to edit down the complexities of English grammar into just those few basic elements which would help people to improve their writing skills. His central rule is to keep everything as simple as possible – or “Omit needless words”. For instance, he kicks off immediately with the apostrophe, the comma, and other points of punctuation which create the most common problems.

Only when he has cleared these out of the way does he get down to what he calls the ‘Elementary Principles of Composition’. One of these first principles is something which I write on three of every four student essays: “Make the paragraph the unit of composition” and “Begin each paragraph with a sentence that supports the topic”. This is the foundation on which he builds his main suggestions for clear writing, which are focused on always creating the direct, the specific, and the concrete statement, rather than striving for special effects.

His approach sometimes seems a little old-fashioned when it includes grammatical terms such as ‘nonrestrictive clauses’ which we don’t really need to know. But every point of advice is well illustrated by examples of good and bad practice, so the reader is left in no doubt in recognising the problem and how to correct it.

He skips lightly over quotation and references, saving most of his energy for an extended chapter on words which are commonly confused or misused – such as Among/Between and That/Which.

The final chapter added by E.B.White is a list of twenty-one guidelines for clear and good writing from which anyone could profit. The suggestions range from keeping the audience in mind, avoiding pretension and too many qualifiers, to hints on the choice of effective vocabulary.

I saw this book recommended in a web site design manual published only a few weeks ago, and it’s certainly true that anyone who needs a brief and clear introduction to the principles of effective writing should get a copy. In fact Strunk’s insistence on the pursuit of brevity is particularly appropriate for the digital era. It’s also amazingly good value.

© Roy Johnson 2002

the elements of style Buy the book at Amazon UK

the elements of style Buy the book at Amazon US


William Strunk Jr and E.B. White, The Elements of Style (4th edition) London: Longman, 1999, pp.105, ISBN 020530902X


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Written style in essays

August 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

sample from HTML program and PDF book

1. For most essays your written style should be plain, clear, and straightforward. You should avoid sloppiness and a casual manner. Don’t try to be ‘impressive’, flowery, or emotive. Remember that an essay is an academic exercise, not a piece of ‘creative writing’.

2. Keep in mind that speech and writing are two different forms of communication. Avoid the use of a chatty or conversational tone when writing essays.

3. Avoid the use of contractions such as ‘isn’t’, ‘can’t’, ‘don’t’ which occur in speech but should not be used in formal writing. These terms should be written out in full as ‘is not’, ‘can not’, and ‘do not’.

4. Avoid the use of common abbreviations such as ‘etc.’, ‘e.g.’, ‘&’, ‘i.e.’. If you need to use these expressions, write out the terms in full, as ‘for example’, ‘and’, ‘that is’. [There is a good argument for never using ‘et cetera’: it can easily suggest that you are being lazy.]

5. Avoid using unnecessary jargon (technical terms), clich&eacute (‘leave no stone unturned’), vogue words (‘situation’ or ‘ongoing’), and slang (‘far-out’).

6. Avoid using metaphors you are used to seeing in print or figures of speech which are currently popular. For instance: ‘the bottom line’, ‘a ballpark figure’. (This is one of George Orwell’s rules for avoiding a tired style.)

7. Remember that the common word order (the syntax) of a simple sentence written in English is as follows. If in doubt, adopt this pattern.

subject – verb – object

The cat eats the goldfish
We are the best team

8. Avoid starting sentences with words such as ‘Again’, ‘Although’, ‘But’, ‘And’, ‘Also’, and ‘With’. These words are conjunctions, which belong in the ‘middle’ of a sentence, not at its beginning.

9. Good style is usually connected with the need for precise punctuation and clearly expressed ideas. The following example shows a sloppily written argument transformed by just the removal of two commas and the addition of a full stop. This creates two shorter but clear sentences instead of one which is very confused.

bad
Smoking became as socially acceptable as drinking, in all classes of society, mostly associated with men until the second world war when women began to smoke openly, in public shocking older members of their sex.

better
Smoking became as socially acceptable as drinking in all classes of society. It was mainly associated with men until the Second World War when women began to smoke openly in public, shocking older members of their sex.

10. Try to avoid the awkward ‘he or she’, the ugly ‘he/she’, and the crass ‘s/he’. These formulations are sometimes used to solve the problems of gender references.

awkward
Candidates should note that any employer is obliged to follow Equal Opportunities policies when he/she is interviewing applicants.

11. The simple solution to this problem is to use the plural form:

better
Candidates should note that all employers are obliged to follow Equal Opportunities policies when they are interviewing applicants.

12. An essay which is written in a sparkling and attractive style will obviously be more interesting to read than one which plods along in a dull manner. However, you should be very cautious about creative or decorative flourishes in academic writing. Jokes, bold metaphors, and even figures of speech can easily seem mannered. If in doubt, stick to clear, plain language.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Filed Under: Writing Essays Tagged With: Academic writing, Essays, Reports, Study skills, Style, Term papers, Writing skills, Writing style

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