University Writing CenterAs teachers, we are often so concerned with the grammatical errors and mundane punctuation problems in our students’ writing that we never have a chance to work on their style. As academic writers, our English composition courses long in the past, we know our writing is not always as clear or effective as it could be, but we don’t know exactly what to do to improve it. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by University of Chicago English professor Joseph M. Williams, was written to fill this gap.
Williams’ book addresses three questions:
Williams cautions that his ten principles have less to do with how you write than with how you rewrite. Most writers have to get their ideas down on paper or on the computer screen before they can begin to worry about organization and style.
In this short article I will deal with only half of the ten lessons, saving the rest for a future effort.
Lesson one, “Write with readers in mind,” and the final lesson, “Write to others as you would have others write to you,” are very closely related. We write to influence readers in some way. Thinking about potential readers helps us know what we can assume, and what we have to explain clearly. English is what linguists have called a “writer-responsible” language, meaning that when we write in English we have to take care of the reader’s needs. If readers have to work hard to process our sentences, and must read between the lines to discover our meanings, they may give up.
Lesson ten translates the golden rule into the writing situation, taking us into an ethical dimension. Unintentional obscurity can be avoided by following Williams’ ten lessons. However, some obscurity is intentional. When the boss says that you are being “involuntarily separated from payroll,” or a politician claims that a false statement was not a lie but “a strategic misrepresentation,” language is being used hide the message rather than express it.
The second lesson is “Write not as the grammarians say you must, but as writers you admire actually do.” Every language undergoes continuous evolution and change, and the grammatical rules of the past do not always fit with current usage. The ultimate test of good style is whether it is effective and appropriate for the current audience and purpose, not whether a nineteenth-century grammarian would approve.
Williams’ third lesson is perhaps the most important of all for avoiding unintended obscurity. He says, “Make important characters the subjects of your sentences.” This means that there should be a strong relationship between the narrative structure of the situation and the grammatical structure of the sentence. Look what happens to this fairy tale story when the characters are not subjects and their actions are not verbs:
Once upon a time, as a walk through the woods was taking place on the part of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf’s jump out from behind a tree occurred, causing fright in Little Red Riding Hood. (Williams 44)
We laugh at this sort of style in a children’s story, but much academic writing is written in exactly this way. Here “walk,” a verb which should be the action, has become the grammatical subject of the rather meaningless verb phrase, “was taking place.” The subject of the main clause is “the Wolf’s jump,” which should be the main action in the sentence. Williams says, “When you consistently match characters (or actors) to subjects, and actions to verbs, readers will judge you to be a clear and direct writer.” If we do so in this instance, we get:
Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was walking through the woods, when the Wolf jumped out from behind a tree and frightened her.
The fourth lesson is a corollary to the third. Williams says, “Use verbs that express specific actions.” Abstract nominalizations (verbs turned into nouns) and passive voice are the two most common devices for mismatching the relationships between characters and actions. Here is an example from a student paper:
The process of advancing scientific knowledge involves the identification of anomalies in existing theories.
“Involve” is not a very specific or active verb. We could rewrite this as: “Scientific knowledge advances through the identification of anomalies in existing theories.” However, “identification” is still a nominalization, and could be rewritten as “identifying.”
Here is a more bureaucratic example:
A reduction in the number of full-time employees was the result of a decline in sales due to the lack of market research.
“Reduction,” “result,” “decline,” “sales,” “lack,” and “research” are all nominalized verbs Starting the sentence with a nominalization usually leads to “was” as a verb. We could rewrite this as, “Sales declined due to inadequate market research, causing management to reduce the number of full-time employees.”
It is rarely possible or desirable to eliminate all nominalizations, but heavily nominalized sentences like the one above hide the actors and obscure the actions, making it difficult for the reader to understand what is going on. Paying just a little attention to these few lessons will result in clearer, more graceful prose, and happier readers.
