Style: Towards Clarity and Grace
I’m reading Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, and for anyone who spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, it’s one of the best books on the subject—better than some of the standbys and better than newer books like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.
But the book has some seriously flaws. Author Joseph M. Williams fails, for example, to follow through on a promised topic, as one Amazon reviewer points out:
The author states on page three that “English writers have responded to three influences on our language. Two are historical and one cultural.” The two historical influences are quickly dealt with, but the cultural influence is never clearly presented.
That’s a serious sin. I would have encouraged Williams to cut way back on the etymological discussion altogether so that he wouldn’t forget to mention explicity the cultural influence on the English language.
Nevertheless, the book is stellar. Williams thrives where other writers on writing have failed: in his examples. You read them and you immediately understand the concept. In his section on concision, he offers this:
Even when you arrange all [sentences' and paragraphs'] parts in all the right ways, they can still succumb to acute prolixity:
The point I want to make here is that we can see the American policy in regard to foreign countries as the State Department in Washington and the White House have put it together and made it public to the world has given material and moral support to too many foreign factions in other countries that have controlled power and have then had to give up the power to other factions that have defeated them.
That is,
Our foreign policy has backed too many losers.
Editing for concision is a skill honed over the course of a lifetime. Authors often don’t realize how few of their words are essential until their article or manuscript is in the hands of an editor with a strict wordcount. (Concision is a life-long skill, but authors don’t know that until they have an editor.) (Authors learn concision once they have an editor.) That life-long learning process accelerates with Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. It focuses less on rehashing the rules we learned in middle school English and more on why what works, works.
For anyone who wants to write a follow-up, know that Williams dismisses precision altogether. (In fact, he misuses precision when he writes that it has to do merely with battles over that/which, I/me, etc.) Precision in language means that two or more people understand the same word to mean the same thing. His neglecting precision—his neglecting almost everything to do with thoughtful language, an linguistic order of magnitude less than “sentence” and “paragraph”—holds the entire book back. Addressing precision could greatly improve a future version.
