Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

For students, scholars, or everyday writers, this is a must-have book. This is a great book for learning how to hone your writing skills to get thoughts on the paper in a way that is still understandable to the reader. He goes over how to effectively construct sentences, link those sentences into paragraphs, and then shape those units so that they are concise, elegant, and coherent. Williams provides multiple examples of what good and bad writing looks like and the keys on how to transform bad writing into good writing.

The best part of the book is the connection that Williams makes between thinking and writing. Bad writing often masks incomplete thinking, so this book is also a guide indirectly of how to read more effectively and deeply. For any student who wants to take their writing to the next level and beyond the strong Strunk and White foundational grammar, this is a book for you.

In the book, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, authors Joseph M. Williams and Gregory C. Colomb provide an effective teaching manual to assist novice writers in turning elementary prose into clear, compelling, and persuasive writing. Instead of offering a tiresome prescription of rules or an overly simplistic how-to list, chapters discuss how to be concise, focussed, and structured in the writing process. To educate writers in distinguishing poor quality writing from high quality writing, numerous real life writing examples are illustrated, demonstrating how sentences and paragraphs can be revised and improved. Aimed at developing advanced writing skills, a variety of practical methodologies are presented to assist writers in producing a coherent and elegant document that succinctly communicates their objectives. Beyond mere mechanics, larger matters of form and organization are explored with the purpose of equipping writers with a range of workable solutions to enable them to better engage with their readers and produce a final draft that is not only readable, but is a skilfully written and professional composition.

Recognizing that even mature writers can sometimes write poorly, the authors also explain the various causes for poor writing and suggest ways for writers to identify, diagnose, and overcome different problems that can occur in the writing process. They identify a number of factors that can contribute to poor writing including: an unfamiliar topic, confusion over the objective, insufficient time to revise, bad writing habits, or just plain ineptitude. Additionally, writers may also write poorly because they use pretentious language, fear making grammatical mistakes, or experience episodes of "stylistic aphasia", a regression that occurs when writers write about things they know little about. Being able to address the sources of poor writing can assist writers in identifying their weaknesses and discover and develop effective strategies for overcoming them.

Additionally, the authors also explore the origins and consequences of writing professional prose. Some distinguished professional writers have crafted complex arguments but have failed to effectively communicate the complexities in a clear and concise fashion, leaving readers feeling confused and incompetent in their reading comprehension. Though complex writing may reflect complex ideas more precisely, it may also needlessly complicate complex ideas, or even complicate simple ideas. Rather than making complex ideas and concepts more convoluted, the authors suggest ways to write in a manner that takes complex material and communicates it in a clear and simple approach, without surrendering professionalism or diminishing the essential components of the argument or objective.

This book covers not the basic grammar issue, but how to make your passage / paragraph / and in general writing flow.

Undergraduate may find it helpful when they are taking a writing class, while graduate students should seriously read this book as manuscript writing is paramount.

Most of my colleagues think I am a good writer. Most of what I know about writing well I learned from this book. It is a fascinating treatise on communication as much as a guide to writing well. It is a must for any professional writer.

I know I'm a bad writer and have been for some time. I always prefered math and science in school to arts and language. Had my middle school teachers at least implied the goal of this book, and my high school teachers actually used it in the classroom, I think I'd be a much more coherent writer. Maybe even thinker.