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A review by owlette
Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Bizup, Joseph Williams
5.0
The best writing resource for non-creative writers. If a how-to-write book makes you want to write, it's a winner, and this book accomplishes that. Hat tip to Behavioral Scientist for sharing this book.
My writing happens mostly in the professional setting (e.g. Jira tickets about database issues, job application, project documentation, and Slack messages). My writing style can be dry--I'm not trying to write lyrical prose when I'm asking an Engineer to fix a bug--but it does need to be clear. But I've never received good instruction on how to write better. [b:Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace Plus Pearson Writer -- Access Card Package|36126345|Style Lessons in Clarity and Grace Plus Pearson Writer -- Access Card Package (12th Edition)|Joseph M. Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503737298l/36126345._SY75_.jpg|57721709] lays down a methodical approach to revising a piece of writing, whether it be a sentence, a paragraph, or the whole piece. As the authors say repeatedly, clarity and directness
The book's main lesson is that clarity and coherence emerge when 1) the subjects of sentences represent the characters and the verbs name their actions and 2) the writing starts with a short segment containing familiar information followed by a longer segment communicating an unfamiliar concept. The first rule applies mostly to individual sentences. I learned that my writing's lack of clarity came from not following the first rule and abusing nominalizations, which is rampant in academic writing. The second rule is about cohesion and coherence. When sentences of a passage are cohesive, readers are left with a sense of coherence. A set of sentences can be clear on their own by following the first rule but not cohesive when put together if the characters of these sentences are different or if new information comes without any pretext.
(One of the surprising things that I learned from these two lessons is that not all verbs have to be active. Like many, I have been told to avoid verbs in passive mode, but the authors say this advice is at best overrated and at worst misguided. One of the most important reasons for using a passive verb in a sentence is that it helps keep the subject of the sentence to be something the reader is familiar with based on the previous sentences: you risk breaking the flow of the information by keeping all verbs in active mode.)
Earlier I said that the authors explicitly lay down steps on how to revise a piece of writing, but they admit that there are some elements of writing that are cannot be hard-coded. For instance, how do you write a sentence that is not just clear but graceful? The kind of writing that leaves the reader in awe of your craft. The authors do their best to analyze what gives a sentence such qualities and provide some tips, but they omit what I think is the more important advice, which is to read: read a lot. I read somewhere that Hunter S. Thompson learned to write by typing out works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway on his typewriter, and I can see how that could have helped him train his muscle memory for constructing phrases and sentences. Similarly, good writers have built a stockpile of templates in their memory by reading, i.e. like those natural language processing AI's, imbibing a lot of data.
Finally, I really love this book because even before I read the book, I've shared the authors' position that the lack of clarity in writing is a lack of sincerity in the author's character. In the final chapter, "The Ethics of Style," the authors claim that unclear writing is not just a matter of skill or craft, but of the writer's character perceived by the reader.
My writing happens mostly in the professional setting (e.g. Jira tickets about database issues, job application, project documentation, and Slack messages). My writing style can be dry--I'm not trying to write lyrical prose when I'm asking an Engineer to fix a bug--but it does need to be clear. But I've never received good instruction on how to write better. [b:Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace Plus Pearson Writer -- Access Card Package|36126345|Style Lessons in Clarity and Grace Plus Pearson Writer -- Access Card Package (12th Edition)|Joseph M. Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503737298l/36126345._SY75_.jpg|57721709] lays down a methodical approach to revising a piece of writing, whether it be a sentence, a paragraph, or the whole piece. As the authors say repeatedly, clarity and directness
"don't refer to anything in [the writing]; they describe how [the writing] makes us feel. ... The problem is to understand what is in [the writing] that makes readers feel they way they do (28)."
The book's main lesson is that clarity and coherence emerge when 1) the subjects of sentences represent the characters and the verbs name their actions and 2) the writing starts with a short segment containing familiar information followed by a longer segment communicating an unfamiliar concept. The first rule applies mostly to individual sentences. I learned that my writing's lack of clarity came from not following the first rule and abusing nominalizations, which is rampant in academic writing. The second rule is about cohesion and coherence. When sentences of a passage are cohesive, readers are left with a sense of coherence. A set of sentences can be clear on their own by following the first rule but not cohesive when put together if the characters of these sentences are different or if new information comes without any pretext.
(One of the surprising things that I learned from these two lessons is that not all verbs have to be active. Like many, I have been told to avoid verbs in passive mode, but the authors say this advice is at best overrated and at worst misguided. One of the most important reasons for using a passive verb in a sentence is that it helps keep the subject of the sentence to be something the reader is familiar with based on the previous sentences: you risk breaking the flow of the information by keeping all verbs in active mode.)
Earlier I said that the authors explicitly lay down steps on how to revise a piece of writing, but they admit that there are some elements of writing that are cannot be hard-coded. For instance, how do you write a sentence that is not just clear but graceful? The kind of writing that leaves the reader in awe of your craft. The authors do their best to analyze what gives a sentence such qualities and provide some tips, but they omit what I think is the more important advice, which is to read: read a lot. I read somewhere that Hunter S. Thompson learned to write by typing out works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway on his typewriter, and I can see how that could have helped him train his muscle memory for constructing phrases and sentences. Similarly, good writers have built a stockpile of templates in their memory by reading, i.e. like those natural language processing AI's, imbibing a lot of data.
Finally, I really love this book because even before I read the book, I've shared the authors' position that the lack of clarity in writing is a lack of sincerity in the author's character. In the final chapter, "The Ethics of Style," the authors claim that unclear writing is not just a matter of skill or craft, but of the writer's character perceived by the reader.
If our readers decide our writing is unnecessarily difficult, we risk losing more than their attention. We also risk losing what writers since Aristotle have called a reliable ethos--the character that readers infer from our writing. ... [Writing] clearly is not just altruistic. It is pragmatic, because we tend to trust most a writer with a reputation for being thoughtful, responsible, and considerate of readers' needs (177)."
This argument resonates a lot with me because I've observed a similar vein of insincerity in data visualization. Data analysts and scientists tend to underestimate this skill. Even though there are a lot of tools and resources out there, I have seen my coworkers present hideous-looking graphs. It is a skill that will go underdeveloped if you never asked yourself whether a visualization you were about to show was clearly understandable to others. Because if it's not, you would have looked up how to fix it. Whether you ever posed that question to yourself is a matter of character. I think George Orwell said it best (as quoted as epigraph to the first chapter of the book): "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."