With One Voice

STYLE: TOWARD CLARITY AND GRACE by Joseph M. Williams. University of Chicago, $17.95.

I BEGAN TO be disenchanted with radical-left politics, in college, when I noticed that the Young Socialists and the Maoists and the Trotskyists seemed to spend more time arguing fine points with one another than they spent lifting up the masses out of their oppression. I drifted away, eventually discovering a different cause: the English language, whose principles I have sworn on a stack of reference books to try to uphold. Many consider this cause to be exclusionary and implicitly right-wing. Perhaps naively, I think of it as quite the opposite, standard English being both a club that anyone may join and one that gives its members license to converse with all the other members. But never mind. In this field, too. I mean to say, the insiders seem to spend an awful lot of time arguing with one another.

Having said that, and having set out to review a book called Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, am I left with anything to do but praise it?

Joseph M. Williams, as a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Chicago, a communications consultant to law firms, corporations, and government agencies, and the author of The Origins of the English Language in addition to three previous, collegetextbook editions of Style, comes wellcredentialed to the task of helping a general readership write better—the aim of this new edition of Style, which is brought to us by the publishers of the Chicago Manual of Style and of Kate Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. The general readership that Williams has in mind, to judge by the kinds of examples of bad and good writing presented in the book, is substantially made up of lawyers, scientists, academics, business people, and bureaucrats. Excellent. Some members of each of these groups certainly do need help with writing, in large part because they overburden their nouns and quell their verbs, leaving the language inert and senseless on the page_ nobody in the prose does anything, usually nobody and nothing capable of doing anything is even present, and the abstractions remaining simply are.

Williams presents a number of arguments that seem designed to get the word torturers to stop, and offers them a variety of clever techniques to use in torture’s stead. For instance, he recommends that writers think of their subject in terms of characters and action:

Stories are among the first kinds of continuous discourse we learn. From the time we are children, we all tell stories to achieve a multitude of ends—to amuse, to warn, to excite, to inform, to explain, to persuade. Storytelling is fundamental to human behavior. No other form of prose can communicate large amounts of information so quickly and persuasively. At first glance, most academic and professional writing seems to consist not of narrative but of explanation. But even prose that may seem wholly discursive and abstract usually has behind it the two central components of a story—characters and their actions. There are no characters visible in (5a), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any; compare (5b):

5a. The current estimate is of a 50% reduction in the introduction of new chemical products in the event that compliance with the Preliminary Manufacturing Notice becomes a requirement under proposed Federal legislation.

5b. If Congress requires that the chemical industry comply with the Preliminary Manufacturing Notice, we estimate that the industry will introduce 50% fewer new products.

He goes on to explain that characters need not be be flesh-and-blood ones, as “Congress” and “we” are in 5b. They may even, he writes, be concepts or theories—a concept that he elaborates skillfully. He has many such concepts and elaborations. For example, he explains when to avoid nominalizations, or nouns derived from verbs, and when not to; in what order to present the parts of ideas so that the overall train of thought will roll smoothly along; the importance of summing up the point of paragraphs and documents, and of doing so in particular places. All this, and other concepts less easily encapsulated, lead one to believe that Style has every prospect of reforming those word torturers who want to be reformed.

WHILE APPLAUDING the job Williams is doing, though, I’d like to correct the impression he tries to give that he is the only man to do it. He starts trying at the very outset of Chapter One, striding into the drawing room of the standardEnglish club and throwing down the gauntlet before his august fellow members William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White:

This is a book about writing clearly. I wish it could be short and simple like some others more widely known, but I want to do more than just urge writers to “Omit Needless Words" or “Be clear.”Telling me to “Be clear” is like telling me to “Hit the ball squarely.” I know that. What I don’t know is how to do it. To explain how to write clearly, I have to go beyond platitudes.

Sneering at rules from The Elements of Style as platitudes is something like ridiculing Shakespeare for all the clichés. It is a gaffe, and Williams doesn’t stop there: he also makes rude noises about John Simon, “Pop Grammarians" in general, and H. W. Fowler. As it happens, I agree with one or two of these negative opinions. But surely it is unwise of Williams to express them in his book, for by doing so, he practically begs his readers to ask, What does he have to say that’s so new? Is the characters-and-action conceit very different from what one would get out of Strunk and White’s rules “Use definite, specific, concrete language” and “Write with nouns and verbs,”together with the explanations and examples that follow them? Is it fair to ridicule Strunk and White’s “Omit needless words” and then devote a chapter to “Concision"? It’s not as if Strunk and White issued that pronouncement oracle-like and then changed the subject; they followed up their concise rules with explanations and examples, just as Williams follows up the “straightforward principles—not rules” that he gives.

Strunk and White’s is probably the best known of all how-to books on writing and is, of the books Williams derides, the one whose intent is most similar to Style’s. (A less well known book that readers of this review may enjoy is The Use and Abuse of the English Language, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, a thoughtful and detailed howto that was originally published, in 1943, under the title The Reader Over Your Shoulder. ) Let’s therefore borrow from Williams a technique that he uses throughout his book, and compare passages from his book and Strunk and White’s:

Shift important information to the right. Moving the important information to the end of a sentence is another way to manage the flow of ideas. And the sentence you just read illustrates a missed opportunity. This is more cohesive and emphatic:

Another way you can manage the flow of ideas is to move the most important information to the end of the sentence.

In fact, this is just the other side of something we’ve already seen — how to move old information to the beginning of a sentence. Sentences that introduce a paragraph or a new section are frequently of an X is Y form. One part, usually older information, glances back at what has gone before; the other announces something new. As we have seen, the older information should come first, the newer last. When it doesn’t, we can often reverse the order of subjects and what follows the verb. . . .
[Style]

And,

18. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.

The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the writer desires to make most prominent is usually the end. . . . The word or group of words entitled to this position of prominence is usually the logical predicate—that is, the new element in the sentence. . . . The principle that the proper place for what is to be made most prominent is the end applies equally to the words of a sentence, to the sentences of a paragraph, and to the paragraphs of a composition.
[The Elements of Style]

I didn’t want to be completely subjective about the relative merits of these passages—the standard-English club is a democratic place—and so I conducted a little, unscientific survey that consisted of asking people which they found clearer. Frankly, I was surprised that The Elements of Style didn’t win hands down. Democracy is like that. Some of the people said appreciative things about both passages, one was as intemperate toward Williams (“You can’t see the forest for the trees”) as Williams is toward Strunk and White, and one was equally intemperate toward both (“In their own ways, both writers are too busy showing off”).

Everyone seemed to agree, however, that the two passages make much the same point. Thus the difference between them comes down to a matter of style. When one is comparing books titled Style and The Elements of Style, this is no small thing. For these books not only are about writing but are writing, teaching by example as well as precept.

For myself, I much prefer the style of, the example set by, a how-to book that forgoes sniping at its fellows and devotes itself singlemindedly to lifting up the masses of words out of their oppression. Still, Williams is not my enemy—or Strunk and White’s. Our common enemy is thoughtless, careless writers and whoever has let many thousands of them ooze out the top of America’s education system, whoever has let millions slip illiterate out the bottom of that system, and whoever in the education system is now perpetuating those two groups.

In the face of such a large and diffuse enemy, it seems to me, the standardEnglish club would do well to show some solidarity. I’ll do my part: Buy Williams’s book. And dig out from storage your dog-eared old copy of The Elements of Style. Set them side by side on your reference shelf, browse them often, and keep your membership up-to-date. □