Style: Toward Clarity And Grace (Chicago Guides To Writing, Editing, And Publishing)

Style: Toward Clarity And Grace (Chicago Guides To Writing, Editing, And Publishing)

Product Description This acclaimed book is a master teachers tested program for turning clumsy prose into clear, powerful, and effective writing. A logical, expert, easy-to-use plan for achieving excellence in expression, Style offers neither simplistic rules nor endless lists of dos and donts. Rather, Joseph Williams explains how to be concise, how to be focused, how to be organized. Filled with realistic examples of good, bad, and better writing, and step-by-step strategies for crafting a sentence or organizing a paragraph, Style does much more than teach mechanics: it helps anyone who must write clearly and persuasively transform even the roughest of drafts into a polished work of clarity, coherence, impact, and personality. Buy Williamss book. And dig out from storage your dog-eared old copy of The Elements of Style. Set them side by side on your reference shelf.Barbara Walraff, Atlantic Let newcoming writers discover this, and let their teachers and readers rejoice. It is a practical, disciplined text that is also a pleasure to read. Christian Century An excellent book....It provides a sensible, well-balanced approach, featuring prescriptions that work.Donald Karzenski, Journal of Business Communication Intensive fitness training for the expressive mind. Booklist (The college textbook version, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9th edition, is available fromLongman. ISBN 9780321479358.) Amazon.com Review Telling me to Be clear, writes Joseph M. Williams in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, is like telling me to Hit the ball squarely. I know that. What I dont know is how to do it. If you are ever going to know how to write clearly, it will be after reading Williams book, which is a rigorous examination of--and lesson in--the elements of fine writing. With any luck, your clear writing will turn graceful, as well. Though most of us, says Williams, would be happy just to write clear, coherent, and appropriately emphatic prose, he is not content to teach us just that. He also attempts, by way of example, to determine what constitutes elegant writing. Despite the proliferation of books in this genre, rarely does one feel so confident in ones instructor. Williams is meticulous and exacting, yet never pedantic. Though he agrees with most of his grammarian colleagues that, generally speaking, the active voice is better than the passive or that the ordinary word is preferable to the fancy, Williams is also quick to assert that theres no sense learning a rule if all we can do is obey it. And he is most emphatic about the absurdity of prescriptions concerning usage (such as, Never begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction). Such rules, he says, are violated so consistently that, unless we are ready to indict for bad grammar just about every serious writer of modern English, we have to reject as misinformed anyone who would attempt to enforce them. --Jane Steinberg About the Author Joseph M. Williams (19332008) was professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago and the author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.He is also coauthor, with Wayne C. Booth andGregory G. Colomb, of the best-selling guide The Craft of Research, also published by the University of Chicago Press.