Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
"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 don't 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 one's 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 there's 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
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
I write this review to try to protect you from buying this book
Customer Rating:
This guy has a beef with Strunk and White. He writes like an annal retentive academic whose gone over too many Phd theses. If that is 'writing with grace,' then grace be damned.
If you want to be a good writer, read great writers like Twain and Orwell and take notes. Do not read this book.
Good luck.
Just what I was looking for to improve my writing
Customer Rating:
I want my writing to be clear, cohesive, coherent, concise and elegant. This book is showing me how.
Helpful
Customer Rating:
Although a little hard to read at first, it definitely gets to the point about good writing. A great read for those who need help writing!
A Must-Have for Academic Writers
Customer Rating:
For students, scholars, or everyday writers, this is a must-have book. This is a great book for learning how to hone your writing skills to get thoughts on the paper in a way that is still understandable to the reader. He goes over how to effectively construct sentences, link those sentences into paragraphs, and then shape those units so that they are concise, elegant, and coherent. Williams provides multiple examples of what good and bad writing looks like and the keys on how to transform bad writing into good writing.
The best part of the book is the connection that Williams makes between thinking and writing. Bad writing often masks incomplete thinking, so this book is also a guide indirectly of how to read more effectively and deeply. For any student who wants to take their writing to the next level and beyond the strong Strunk and White foundational grammar, this is a book for you.
Excellent Resource
Customer Rating:
In the book, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, authors Joseph M. Williams and Gregory C. Colomb provide an effective teaching manual to assist novice writers in turning elementary prose into clear, compelling, and persuasive writing. Instead of offering a tiresome prescription of rules or an overly simplistic how-to list, chapters discuss how to be concise, focussed, and structured in the writing process. To educate writers in distinguishing poor quality writing from high quality writing, numerous real life writing examples are illustrated, demonstrating how sentences and paragraphs can be revised and improved. Aimed at developing advanced writing skills, a variety of practical methodologies are presented to assist writers in producing a coherent and elegant document that succinctly communicates their objectives. Beyond mere mechanics, larger matters of form and organization are explored with the purpose of equipping writers with a range of workable solutions to enable them to better engage with their readers and produce a final draft that is not only readable, but is a skilfully written and professional composition.
Recognizing that even mature writers can sometimes write poorly, the authors also explain the various causes for poor writing and suggest ways for writers to identify, diagnose, and overcome different problems that can occur in the writing process. They identify a number of factors that can contribute to poor writing including: an unfamiliar topic, confusion over the objective, insufficient time to revise, bad writing habits, or just plain ineptitude. Additionally, writers may also write poorly because they use pretentious language, fear making grammatical mistakes, or experience episodes of "stylistic aphasia", a regression that occurs when writers write about things they know little about. Being able to address the sources of poor writing can assist writers in identifying their weaknesses and discover and develop effective strategies for overcoming them.
Additionally, the authors also explore the origins and consequences of writing professional prose. Some distinguished professional writers have crafted complex arguments but have failed to effectively communicate the complexities in a clear and concise fashion, leaving readers feeling confused and incompetent in their reading comprehension. Though complex writing may reflect complex ideas more precisely, it may also needlessly complicate complex ideas, or even complicate simple ideas. Rather than making complex ideas and concepts more convoluted, the authors suggest ways to write in a manner that takes complex material and communicates it in a clear and simple approach, without surrendering professionalism or diminishing the essential components of the argument or objective.
Select button not working? 
