ReviewStyle: Ten Lessons and Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams
Addison Wesley Longman, 1999, Sixth edition 309 pages, ISBN # 0-321-02408

Bottom Line: Highly Recommended, this one is great.

If you can’t tell from the bottom line, I love this book. I don’t always use it as much as I should but every time I pick it up I learn something. It is packed with information, but it’s well-organized and fairly easy to use.

If you are weak grammatically, feel that you write uninteresting sentences, or have poor control over language and sentence structure this book will help, and it offers tons of useful wisdom about writing along the way. For instance, I love the section on “Following Rules Thoughtfully” and the discussion of “Folklore” and “Correctness” – in a time when there are vicious debates about rules that can chip away at the confidence of new writers and make them feel like they are failing if they are not doing it “right” (which usually means how whichever writer they are talking to is doing it), this section is gold. Then he discusses things like the difference between “simple mindedness” and “clarity” – great stuff that all writers can benefit from reading.

In that vein, the book is not aimed at fiction writers specifically but at students of writing, still, the content is useful for all writers and types of writing. If you haven’t guess by now I enjoy books that make me think about writing rather than just spouting rules, and this one certainly does that. It has a little bit of everything – lessons and analysis, discussion of technique and philosophy of writing, and much more.

Be prepared, though, this is a pretty technical book – while it is interesting and even entertaining (if you are a writing geek like me and entertained by such things) it explains style in great detail, and offers analyses and exercises that are extremely useful. I pick it up from time to time (and used to teach with it often) and try to target specific trouble spots or just find something random to work on. If you are revising, this can help you work on fine-tuning many editing issues, but if you are starting something new and, for instance, are stuck for writing new material, this book is great to pick up and get things rolling. You can choose any particular section or exercises and start reworking your text (it will be the better for it, I promise) and just get the juices flowing.

I have had this book in its various editions for about eight years and I still haven’t used it all and return to it over and over again – it’s expensive but you’ll get your use from it. It’s a relatively advanced writing book, and you can teach yourself a lot with it, though it could be easier to use in a class or group where you can discuss the issues and go over exercises together.

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