Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, 5th edition

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace reflectsthe wisdom and clear authorial voice of Williams’ best-selling book, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, while streamlining every chapter to create a very brief, yet powerfully direct guide to writing with style.

The concise clarity of this book makes it a handy reference for anyone interested in good writing--as well as a quick and ideal guide for freshman composition courses, writing courses across the disciplines, and as a supporting text in courses that require clear and direct writing. Style: The Basics covers the elemental principles of writing that will help students diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their prose quickly and revise effectively. The text features principles of effective prose written in Williams’ hallmark conversational style, offering reason-based principles, rather than hard and fast rules, for successful, effective writing.

• 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.

• 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.