Rating: 
Summary: in response to a reader from Brooklyn (see below)
Review: A writer immersed in the culture of his specialized profession tends to obfuscate his point with complicated syntax. Instead of guiding the reader straight to the point, readers of technical material or academic journals have to weave through a maze of cancatenated clauses and untangle of string of words connecting the subject, verb and object. (I believe) Williams attributes this tendency to the fact that writers in the academic world want to appear very intelligent to their readers. But Williams thinks that writers sound more intelligent when readers can simply understand what they are reading! I may be over-simplifying his thesis a bit, but basically Williams is critiquing academic culture and its influence on inexperienced writers.
Rating:
Summary: in response to a reader from Brooklyn (see below)
Review: A writer immersed in the culture of his specialized profession tends to obfuscate his point with complicated syntax. Instead of guiding the reader straight to the point, readers of technical material or academic journals have to weave through a maze of cancatenated clauses and untangle of string of words connecting the subject, verb and object. (I believe) Williams attributes this tendency to the fact that writers in the academic world want to appear very intelligent to their readers. But Williams thinks that writers sound more intelligent when readers can simply understand what they are reading! I may be over-simplifying his thesis a bit, but basically Williams is critiquing academic culture and its influence on inexperienced writers.
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Summary: Sound Advice, Explicit Instruction
Review: Even if the authors themselves don't always exemplify clarity and grace in their own writing, their techniques are the most useful and practical I've ever seen in a how-to book. What they do is show you HOW to implement Strunk & White's advice, by giving you explicit, step-by-step instruction on what you must do to "Be concise" and "Omit needless words" and achieve clarity, coherence, and perhaps even (God willing) grace. So what if Williams & Colomb don't write as beautifully as E. B. White or as pungently as Will Strunk? If you take the trouble to learn their eminently sensible techniques, your writing will improve dramatically and you will never again produce the kind of ghastly prose found in most doctoral dissertations, to take a particularly egregious genre. That in itself is a great boon to mankind.
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Summary: A Systematic and Enlightening Guide to Better Writing
Review: For people who are serious about improving their writing skills, this is an excellent how-to book. Prof. Williams does not dispense facile advice ("use the active voice") or mindless rules of usage and grammar ("don't split infinitives"). Instead, he teaches you, step by step, how to construct sentences and paragraphs that are clear, concise, coherent, even elegant. He explains in great detail the principles and techniques involved in achieving clarity, grace, and other attributes of good writing. And he illustrates these principles and techniques with many specific, telling examples. "Style" is not a quick read, but it is definitely worth the effort.
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Summary: The best writing book EVER!
Review: Go to any bookstore (cyber or otherwise) - see writing books arrayed row upon row. Now, take down a copy of "Style" by Joseph Williams, and leave Zinsser and Strunk & White collecting dust on the shelf, because William's is the only one you'll ever need. Williams describes the actual writing process better than anyone, and presents a method which an aspiring writer may employ to accomplish his or her writing goals - whatever they are! And he does it without recourse to the usual grammatical rules and "mechanics of writing" approach. That approach [resumptive modifier!] never helped anyone become a better writer - and it sure discouraged a lot of us!Make no mistake! This is not beach reading, as Williams himself would tell you. Williams develops an entire system of writing over the course of the book, adding to it chapter by chapter. If you're not used to sustained intellectual effort, or if you have a short attention span, this book will definitely be a stretch. It requires prolonged concentration. But if you put forth the effort, it will be rewarded! I've read this book through at least eight times cover to cover, and while I'm not a great writer, I've improved immeasurably. My compliments to Professor Williams - a great book!
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Summary: Should Be in Classrooms
Review: I can't believe I was never given this great book in school. I learned how bad my "good" writing was and why. Williams unveils the habit of politicians, academics, and writers to hide behind flowery language to compensate for substance. This book changed my writing entirely.
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Summary: The book my students have learned the most from.
Review: I'm an economics professor who started teaching writing courses as a spare time activity when I discovered that our English faculty was doing such a poor job of it. My writing class is directed at college undergrads and grad students. I tried a number of books, but settled on Williams and have been using it since the 2nd edition. I find that students can make an enormous improvement in their writing in just ten weeks. If your goal is to learn the kind of writing that will help you explain a process, change someone's mind, or write the winning proposal, Williams is your man. Don't read it all in one session, and you must actually do the exercises. Try a chapter a week. It works. Charles Lave, University of California, Irvine
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Summary: Great insights into the cognitive processes of reading
Review: It's a shame that this excellent book is not better known. I stumbled upon it after I had learned, the hard way, many of the "secrets" of good writing that Williams lays out for you here. What he does, unlike all the other advice-givers, is explain and show how to make your writing easy to understand and a pleasure to read. His own writing is crystal clear, and he provides examples that he fully analyzes to show, without fuzziness, why he claims that one approach is better than another. If you *really* want to improve your writing, buy this book and work your way through it. By the end, your writing will be better than that of 99% of your classmates or co-workers.
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Summary: The best book on writing ever written
Review: Joseph Williams' book, "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" is the best book on writing I have ever read, by far. Williams himself describes the emphasis of the book on page one: "Telling me to 'Be clear' is like telling me to 'Hit the ball squarely.' I know that. What I don't know is how to do it." But Williams does know how to write well, and his explanations are precise and concrete. This book takes a sort of linguistic, almost scientific approach to improving your writing style. I first learned of Williams' work in "The Language Instinct," by the Stephen Pinker, the acclaimed professor of linguistics from MIT. Unlike every other writing book, this one is more than a laundry list of grammatical shoulds and shouldn'ts. This book is about HOW-- how to write to suit the human brain's innate method of processing information. I am a professional writer, and I have a whole book case filled with grammar books. But this book is worth more than all the others combined. If you're a writer, this is the book you've been looking for.
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Summary: Best Book on Writing English...
Review: Most books on how to write better English are pretty near to useless. Many of them scare you into worrying that you might use "which" when you should use "that" (never mind that an extra "which" never caused any reader the smallest bit of confusion). Others demand that you strive for "clarity" or "brevity" or "coherence"--but then somehow never provide any useful advice on just how, exactly, to do so. Joseph Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace is an exception. It is the only truly useful book on English prose style that I have ever found. Even Strunk and White cannot compete with the quality of the advice that Williams gives. Perhaps more important, the advice that Williams gives can be used. As Williams puts it, his aim is to go "beyond platitudes." Advice like "'Be clear' is like telling me to 'Hit the ball squarely.' I know that. What I don't know is how to do it." Williams tells us how to do it. Williams's advice is particularly useful because it is reader based. Most books on style are rule-based: follow these rules and you will be a good writer. Williams recognizes that clear writing is writing that makes the reader feel clear about what he or she is reading. This difference in orientation makes Williams's advice much more profound: he has a theory of why the rules are what they are (and what to do when the rules conflict) that books that focus on rules alone lack. His advice starts at the level of the sentence. Williams believes that readers find sentences easy to read and understand when the logic of the thought follows the logic of the sentence: the subjects of sentences should be the actors, and the verbs of the sentence should be the crucial actions. The beginning of a sentence should look back and connect the reader with the ideas that have been mentioned before. The end of the sentence should look forward, and is the place to put new ideas and new information. His advice continues at the level of the paragraph. The sentences that make up a paragraph should have consistent topics. New topics and new themes should be found at the end of a paragraph's introductory sentence (or sentences). Readers will find a paragraph to be coherent if it has one single articulate summary sentence, which is almost always found either at the end of the paragraph or as the last of the paragraph's introductory sentences. His advice concludes with four chapters on being concise, on figuring out the appropriate length, on being elegant, and on using constructions that do not jar the reader. I think that these last four chapters are less successful than the other chapters of the book. They contain much sound advice. But the argument of the book becomes more diffuse. The first six chapters present and illustrate overarching organizing principles for achieving clarity, coherence, and cohesion. The last four chapters present long lists of things to try to do. (However, the fangs-bared attack on "pop grammarians" found in the last chapter is fun to read.) So, gentle reader, if you want to become a better writer of English, go buy and work through this book. I, at least, have never found a better.
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