Style

Description

• Adapted from Williams’ best-selling Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, now in its ninth edition, The Basics provides a direct, highly readable, and concise conversation on style for students learning the principles of successful writing.
• Emphasises the strategies for diagnosing our own prose to anticipate the judgments of readers—and to make readers think better of what we write and therefore pay more attention to it.
• Provides a model for good writing in any context clear, accessible prose.
• Summarises quick and easy steps to writing effectively.

• Preface
• Lesson 1 Understanding Style
• Lesson 2 Actions
• Lesson 3 Characters
• Lesson 4 Cohesion and Coherence
• Lesson 5 Emphasis
• Lesson 6 Global Coherence
• Lesson 7 Concision
• Lesson 8 Shape
• Lesson 9 Elegance
• Lesson 10 The Ethics of Style
• Index

• A new coauthor,  Joe Bizup of Boston University, created the revision for the 5th  edition.   Joe’s intimate knowledge of Williams’s Style, and the linguistic and rhetorical traditions in which it is grounded, makes him the ideal person to revise the new edition and carry on the book’s unique voice.

•  The lesson on “Motivating Coherence” and the lesson on  “Global Coherence”  have been moved to become Lessons 6 and 7 respectively. This move continues the trajectory of the last few editions where the importance of global or document-level features of texts was increasingly emphasized. Now, rather than moving from sentence-level to document-level issues, the book follows the logic of its subtitle and proceeds from clarity to grace   

•  In response to readers’ suggestions, some explanations have been streamlined and examples have been updated to better appeal to today’s students.