Style - Joseph Williams.pdf

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CONTENTS
P A R T O N E
LESSON ONE
LESSON TWO
Style as Choice
U n d e r s t a n d i n g Style
Correctness
P A R T T W O
LESSON THREE
LESSON FOUR
LESSON FIVE
LESSON SIX
Clarity
Actions
Characters
Cohesion a n d Coherence
Emphasis
P A R T T H R E E
LESSON SEVEN
LESSON EIGHT
LESSON NINE
Grace
Concision
Shape
Elegance
P A R T F O U R
LESSON TEN
Clarity of Form
Motivating Coherence
Global Coherence
LESSON ELEVEN
P A R T FIVE
Ethics
The Ethics of Style
LESSON TWELVE
Appendix: Punctuation
Glossary
Suggested Answers
PREFACE
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft.
You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
—KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
T H E N I N T H EDITION
What's New
The obvious change to this ninth edition of Style is a new subtitle:
no longer
Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace
but just
Lessons in ...
To avoid changing the title of past editions, I added material under
the headings of
epilogue, appendix,
and
afterword,
creating a
hodge-podge of a book. In the interest of straightening out this
disorder, I've turned the two epilogues into lessons and put them
before the lesson on ethics.
I have also made substantive changes. I have replaced the ethi-
cal analysis of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address with an analysis
of the Declaration of Independence. In this new analysis, I make the
same point I did about the Second Inaugural: We should under-
stand how gifted writers manipulate the language of their argument
and thereby our responses to its logic and substance, and consider
the ethical implications of that manipulation.
I have added new material.
To Lesson 2, I've added a reference list of real and alleged
errors so that readers can find a discussion of them more easily.
I've also added a note suggesting that while the so-called rule
about not beginning a sentence with
because
makes no sense, it is
stylistically
sound advice.
To Lesson 8, I've added a section on how to work quotations
into the flow of a sentence gracefully and how to punctuate
around quotation marks.
To Lesson 10 (formerly the second epilogue), I've added mat-
erial on introductions, a new section on diagnosing and revising
introductions, and a new section on conclusions.
To Lesson 11, I've added a note on paragraphs that might dis-
concert some teachers, but that I think takes a realistic view about
their structure.
To Lesson 12 on ethics, I've added a section on plagiarism.
Most treatments of the subject focus on the actions that constitute
it, but this book is based on how readers make judgments, so I
discuss plagiarism from the readers' point of view: what makes
them suspect it, so that honest writers can avoid the mistaken per-
ception of it.
To the appendix on punctuation, I've added a section on artful
sentence fragments and on apostrophes, and highlighted more occa-
sions where choices in punctuation have stylistic consequences.
In several lessons, I've added a new feature called "Quick Tip."
These offer short bits of practical advice about how to deal with
some common problems.
I've also done a lot of line editing. After twenty-five years of
revising this book, you'd think by this time I'd have it right, but
there always seem to be sentences that make me slap my forehead,
wondering how I could have written them.
What's the Same
This ninth edition aims at answering the same questions I asked
in the earlier ones:
• What is it in a sentence that makes readers judge it as they do?
• How do we diagnose our own prose to anticipate their
judgments?
• How do we revise a sentence so that readers will think better
of it?
The standard advice about writing ignores those questions. It
is mostly truisms like
Make a plan, Don't use the passive, Think of
your audience—advice
that most of us ignore as we wrestle ideas
out onto the page. When I drafted this paragraph, I wasn't think-
ing about you; I was struggling to get my own ideas straight. I did
know that I would come back to these sentences again and again
(I didn't know that it would be for more than twenty-five years),
and that it would be only then—as I revised—that I could think
about you and discover the plan that fit my draft. I also knew that
as I did so, there were some principles I could rely on. This book
explains them.
PRINCIPLES, N O T PRESCRIPTIONS
Those principles may seem prescriptive, but that's not how I
intend them. I offer them as ways to help you predict how readers
will judge your prose and then help you decide whether and how
to revise it. As you try to follow those principles, you may write
more slowly. That's inevitable. Whenever we reflect on what we
do as we do it, we become self-conscious, sometimes to the point
of near-paralysis. It passes. And you can avoid some of it if you
remember that these principles have less to do with drafting than
with revision. If there is a first principle of
drafting,
it is to ignore
most of the advice about how to do it.
SOME PREREQUISITES
To learn how to revise efficiently, though, you must know a few
things:
• You should know a few grammatical terms:
SUBJECT, VERB,
NOUN, ACTIVE, PASSIVE, CLAUSE, PREPOSITION, a n d COORDINATION.
All grammatical terms are capitalized the first time they
appear and are defined in the text or in the Glossary.
• You have to learn new meanings for two familiar words:
TOPIC
a n d STRESS.
• You will have to learn a few new terms. Two are important:
NOMINALIZATION
and
METADISCOURSE;
three are useful:
RESUMPTIVE
MODIFIER, SUMMATIVE MODIFIER,
and
FREE MODIFIER.
Some stu-
dents object to learning new words, but the only way to avoid
that is never to learn anything new.
Finally, if you read this book on your own, go slowly. It is not
an amiable essay to read in a sitting or two. Take the lessons a few
pages at a time, up to the exercises. Do the exercises, edit someone
else's writing, then some of your own written a few weeks ago,
then something you wrote that day.
Over the last twenty-five years, I have been gratified by the
reception of
Style.
To those of you who have sent me comments
and responses—thank you. I'm also pleased that the first edition
created a new topic in linguistic studies: metadiscourse. The few
pages devoted to that topic in the first edition have led to scores of
articles and even a few books. A web search for
metadiscourse

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