10 Teaching Methods

10.1 Resources

Williams, J. M. (1990). Style, toward clarity and grace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-89914-4, 208 pages, $17.95.

Reviewed by Patricia Campbell Warner, University of Massachusetts

How many times have you strained for a sentence in a professional article, only to grasp it after hacking through convoluted construction and tongue-twisting polysyllabics: How many have you written yourself: If you care about communicating your ideas, to say nothing of language and its use, this is the book for you. Joseph M. Williams' Style should rest beside every textiles and clothing author's computer well-thumbed, routinely consulted, its concepts memorized.
Writing style is not the strong suit of CTRJ authors. Indeed, our journal promotes a dry, pseudoscientific, jargon-filled approach to professional writing that drains personal style from authors' manuscripts. Even worse, professors hand down the precepts of turgid institutional prose to their students. Should anyone doubt this, conversations with researchers about their work are involved and fascinating, but once the work is in print, the articles reveal no semblance of the lively, enthusiastic discussion. Style will change all that for authors and editors alike.
Williams's book is directed to experienced writers who, in the words of the dust jacket, want to turn "rough drafts and clumsy prose into clear, powerful, and effective writing." Identify nine different areas of concern, from clarity and cohesion to elegance and use, Williams often rewrites examples to illustrate his case, and challenges us to rewrite them ourselves. Occasionally, he simplifies an eminent author's eloquent passage to show that even though simplification is important, it can lead to dull, humdrum prose.
His powerful teaching tool is his use of story-telling as a technique to avoid writing that gives the reader a "bad feeling behind [the] eyes", "sentences that make us feel we have to work harder than we think we ought to (or want to)". He advocates avoiding the nominalizations (nouns derived from verbs) beloved by academics, instead letting "doers" perform the action. It takes work to learn this device, but the effort leads to active verbs rather than passive, and a vitality missing in awkward and wooden passages.
His chapter on elegance (a difficult concept to teach) discusses how to listen to "the natural emphasis we hear in or mind's ear". By analyzing passages visually to underscore authors' emphasis and rhythm, he teaches us powerful sentence construction. But it was the chapter on usage that appealed to me most. Through a brief history of the English language, its rules and use, he shows how rich varied and flexible it is. He discusses fine points of use and style including several that have been strenuously edited out of my own writing - to its detriment, I have felt. "Once we decide to follow all the rules, we deprive ourselves of stylistic flexibility", he maintains. It is time our reviewers and editors embrace equality flexibility.
In an era when use of the English language has deteriorated alarmingly, and when colleges and universities are belatedly awakening to that fact, it is mandatory that we instructors hone our own language skills. This is an excellent book whose accessible information should be standard text for us all.