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Summary: If you read only one book on writing, make it this one!
Review: Oftentimes I've admired writers whose succint style and laser-beam like precision gave their writings an impressive and expressive edge. I only wish some wise soul had exposed me to a book such as this 30 years earlier. Please plant the intellectual seeds of sequoias in any young writers you know, and buy a copy of this book as a gift. Professor Williams extraordinary lessons in style, cohesion and use of the English language make this book an absolute joy to read
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Summary: A Great Book
Review: Reading this book, together with the "Key to Great Writing" would greatly improve your skills of writing. I've tried it. It works.
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Summary: Strunk and White for poindexters
Review: Strunk and White tell us to "omit needless words", and rely on taste to be our guide. The methodical Dr. Williams, viewing this as old-fashioned, sets out to define exactly what words are needless, and why, and how best to get rid of them. It's a worthy goal. Too bad the book stinks.It's funny that Williams quotes H. L. Mencken's remark that most books about writing are badly written. He first quotes it, then goes on to prove it. Normal humans from Planet Earth wouldn't say "stylistic infelicity" when they meant "bad writing". They wouldn't say "peripherally relevant" when they meant "closely related". And they wouldn't dream of saying "topicalize X", not even under torture, if what they wanted to say was "make X the topic of the sentence". (You read that right, the guy unashamedly says "topicalize".) Want some idea of what you'll be getting yourself into? Check out this boner of a sentence, typical of the writing style of the whole book: "But the object of our attention is writing whose success we measure not primarily by the pleasure we derive from it, but by how well it does a job of work." Someone ought to tell this guy to omit needless words. The parallelism isn't parallel, the phrase "of our attention" is pointless, the phrase "whose success we measure" is awkward, and that "job OF WORK" is simply nauseating. An Earthling would write something like this: "Our goal is not just pleasant prose, but effective prose." So the whole book is written in turgid-ese, even while trying to speak out against it. It's all just an endless wearying slog through the mire. Not unintelligible, just not worth the effort. For what do we learn at the end of the Long March? We learn we should omit needless words. Last but not least, the book is a typographical disaster, with everything jumbled together and packed into the page. Skimming is impossible. Many of the five star reviews here are from technical writers, engineers, and so forth. I see a guy from MIT, another from Compuserve, and that's as it should be. They're enured to bad English already, and I'm sure that compared to an engineering textbook this is John friggin' Keats. But for the rest of us, it's just not good enough. (It's by a linguist, after all, and what the heck do they know about language?) So it's back to Strunk and White for non-fiction. If you're interested in clearing up confusion in your fiction, check out "Writing and Selling Your Novel" by Jack Bickham, especially chapters 4 and 6. Teachers should consider "Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student".
Rating:
Summary: Strunk and White for poindexters
Review: Strunk and White tell us to "omit needless words", and rely on taste to be our guide. The methodical Dr. Williams, viewing this as old-fashioned, sets out to define exactly what words are needless, and why, and how best to get rid of them. It's a worthy goal. Too bad the book stinks. It's funny that Williams quotes H. L. Mencken's remark that most books about writing are badly written. He first quotes it, then goes on to prove it. Normal humans from Planet Earth wouldn't say "stylistic infelicity" when they meant "bad writing". They wouldn't say "peripherally relevant" when they meant "closely related". And they wouldn't dream of saying "topicalize X", not even under torture, if what they wanted to say was "make X the topic of the sentence". (You read that right, the guy unashamedly says "topicalize".) Want some idea of what you'll be getting yourself into? Check out this boner of a sentence, typical of the writing style of the whole book: "But the object of our attention is writing whose success we measure not primarily by the pleasure we derive from it, but by how well it does a job of work." Someone ought to tell this guy to omit needless words. The parallelism isn't parallel, the phrase "of our attention" is pointless, the phrase "whose success we measure" is awkward, and that "job OF WORK" is simply nauseating. An Earthling would write something like this: "Our goal is not just pleasant prose, but effective prose." So the whole book is written in turgid-ese, even while trying to speak out against it. It's all just an endless wearying slog through the mire. Not unintelligible, just not worth the effort. For what do we learn at the end of the Long March? We learn we should omit needless words. Last but not least, the book is a typographical disaster, with everything jumbled together and packed into the page. Skimming is impossible. Many of the five star reviews here are from technical writers, engineers, and so forth. I see a guy from MIT, another from Compuserve, and that's as it should be. They're enured to bad English already, and I'm sure that compared to an engineering textbook this is John friggin' Keats. But for the rest of us, it's just not good enough. (It's by a linguist, after all, and what the heck do they know about language?) So it's back to Strunk and White for non-fiction. If you're interested in clearing up confusion in your fiction, check out "Writing and Selling Your Novel" by Jack Bickham, especially chapters 4 and 6. Teachers should consider "Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student".
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Summary: THE Book on writing. Don't waste your time on any other!
Review: Style is THE book to read if you want to improve your writing. The book does an amazing job of explaining just what makes bad writing bad, and it gives you easy to follow details on how to improve your writing. I noticed that there are a few bad reviews on this site. I can only fathom that the readers who wrote those reviews never really gave the book a chance. Aside from missing Williams's humor, those reviewers probably were too stuck in old-fashioned generalizations about writing. If you want a book that analyzes writing intelligently and in detail, this is THE book for you.
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Summary: Make Your Syntax Mirror Your Semantics
Review: Style was the main text for a course on editing that I recently took, and I'm glad it was. I've heard my share of vague and prescriptive advice on writing-avoid the passive, be succinct, revise often-but Style gave me a more tangible set of practical tools to parse prose and rework syntax towards, as he calls it, clarity and grace. Williams's program has since become second nature to me, and it has sharpened my writing and my editing tremendously. In this genre, many handbooks contain different permutations of the same advice. Some of this advice Williams has included, including eliminating wordiness and putting emphasis at the ends of sentences, but I was struck by how much of what Williams advises was unusually specific and amazingly fresh. Williams's program goes like this: avoid nominalizations, which are nouns derived from verbs, often ending in suffixes such as -ing and -tion. Use verbs to describe actions. Use nouns to describe characters. So far, this will change "our analysis of the company's performance" to the more straightforward "we analyzed how the company performed". He adds: put the topic, or something that refers back to prior discourse at the beginning of the sentence. Put the grammatical subject, verb, and object(s) as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible, with minimal interruptions between. Then pile everything else afterwards. At times I felt like this could be condensed into a few paragraphs, but, of course, 300 pages makes this book a more substantial package, and it gives space for practice exercises and illustrative examples. Williams doesn't give advice in bullet-pointed directives or in disconnected bits and pieces; he builds an editing system that functions as a coherent whole. In a way, it's like learning a foreign language: although the vocabulary is the same, you learn how to express yourself in a syntax that is contrary to the ways that many of us first write. Each of the first nine chapters builds on the previous. What you learn is an interconnected system of editing, a new way to dissect and reassemble sentences. I especially want to emphasize how Williams does in this book four things that set him apart from just about every other writing guru out there: 1. He narrows the scope of his book to sentence level revisions. Many competitors either never define their scope, or they default into trying to encompass every phase the writing process. By setting his scope so narrow, Williams can delve into the excruciating details of the rhetoric of the sentence. His program can truly help you perfect one small part of your writing; just don't expect this book to teach you how to do research or how to organize your paper. 2. He makes grammar useful. I have seriously wondered whether students who learn grammar learn to do anything practical besides parsing sentences and nitpicking "mistakes". Many studies show it's not helpful to writing, but that may be because grammar is traditionally taught as a simplistic list of mechanical no-no's. Williams differs in that he treats grammar as a descriptive nomenclature that allows editors to more consciously manipulate a sentence's syntax in ways that mirror its semantics. 3. He rejects rigid prescriptivism, and urges that "[t]he alternative to blind obedience is selective observance." Many other writing handbooks, such as Hacker and Strunk and White, never make this distinction, so they freely mix their good advice with longstanding myths about not splitting infinitives and other silliness. That sort of advice helps your writing about as much as avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk helps your health. 4. He draws on linguistic research. Writing handbooks traditionally come from writers in the humanities, writers who overlook empirical research in favor of a well-crafted argument. Williams breaks from tradition as he informs his text with Eleanore Rosch's research in Prototype Semantics. The often incommunicado disciplines of Linguistics and Writing come together, complimenting the other quite effectively. Style is not a book for beginners. If you haven't done some college-level writing, this book won't help much. Also, you should already be familiar enough with grammatical terminology that you can parse a sentence into its constituents. Although Williams does briefly review grammar, you will get overwhelmed if you have to learn both a grammar lesson and a style lesson simultaneously. The biggest problem with this book is that it still remains such a secret.
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Summary: a must for anyone who writes
Review: this (short) book is a must for any writer, whether fiction, nonfiction or academic. the ten lessons help to make your sentences easier to read and understand.
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Summary: Mainly fixes sentences
Review: This book contains many examples of horribly convoluted prose, many of them contrived to be more obscure than anyone could imagine. These bad examples are fixed using useful general principles, like replacing names for actions with verbs. The focus is primarily on sentences with some attention to paragraphs. The book "The New Oxford Guide to Writing" by Thamas Kane is more ambitious in covering the organization of larger documents and including a more varied approach to making text interesting. Bottom line: Williams to fix the egregious, Kane to make things sing.
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Summary: Best book on writing I have in my entire collection
Review: This book fundamentally challenged and changed my view of writing. In simple and clear prose, Williams showed me how to write, true to the adage "Show don't tell." He gives examples of both good and bad writing and works through them, clearly showing what distinguishes good and bad writing, and how to avoid the latter. The book is so well written, that many years ago when I purchased the 5th edition, I was able to read and understand it thoroughly as a freshman in college, without needing an instructor or upperdivision English class to explain the principles of the book (which he sums up succinctly at the end of each lesson). Through his writing, Williams illustrated the principles of good writing far better than any of my English professors later did. If you wish to write well, let this book be the first and foremost step to your goal.
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Summary: It superbly teaches the principles of technical writing.
Review: This book is to me nothing short of a marvel. It systematically and clearly teaches the principles of technical writing. These same principles can be applied often to other writing as well. It gives examples of the problems in this type of writing and has exercises with which the reader can work. I particularly like the summaries at the ends of each chapter. My job requires technical writing, and I am still learning ways from this book to improve my ability in this area. Mr. Williams has produced a real tool of enlightenment. My opinion is based on the third edition while the book is currently in its fifth edition
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