Rating: 
Summary: A First Chapter Lacking Clarity
Review: Perfect book for software engineers, and any other extremely smart persons who tend to disdain "illogical" rules and exhortations.
Rating: 
Summary: The best book on writing I've ever read
Review: This book has the potential to completely transform your writing. Not only that, it is clearly written, immensely readable, concise, amusing, loaded with examples and cheap! Everything an aspiring author could wish for, plus the skills it can give you are IMMEDIATELY useful. Once I'd finished only the first 1/3, I already regretted not having read this book a long, long time ago.Get one for yourself - it can improve any and all of your writing. If you have children of high school age or older, get one for each of them. Put into practice the simple lessons it teaches and your writing will be "top of the class."
Rating:
Summary: Sound Advice, Explicit Instruction
Review: This is, by far, the best book on writing that I have ever read. I stumbled upon this book while taking a free writing seminar at Pepperdine University. I must say that I have never had such a wondrous, wholly unexpected discovery and experience as this. In the book Williams explains why some writing is clear and some unclear by relating narrative prose to composition. He states that when we can identify characters, i.e. people or things, with subjects, and actions with verbs, then we tend to think the writing is clear. He gives example upon example to buttress his point. Later he describes how to write coherent paragraphs and papers - not by concatenating one unrelated sentence to another but by making sure the topics of the sentences are related to each other, forming a cohesive unity. The book ends by examining ways to increase elegance in your writing - a fitting finish to a systematic, rational approach to writing. I must admit that another reason I enjoyed the book so much was that, being an engineer working in academia and doing research, I have read so many abstruse, incoherent papers that I wanted to scream! This book gives cogent, principled explanations about how to change these incoherent, murky writings into clear and concise papers. As I hope to have people read my works and not become frustrated this book was the perfect antidote. And of course, the proof is in the pudding - I am quite often complemented on my writing by other researchers. Could there be any better motivation to buy the book than this?!
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