Joseph Williams, “Style, toward clarity and Grace,” and Strunk and White’s classic, “Elements of Style,” are two different books that provide rules for becoming a better writer. While there are many areas where they overlap, there are also many areas where they differ.
Firstly, the biggest difference that I noticed was the overall style of each book. In reading “Elements of Style,” it felt more like a ‘quick and dirty’ rule book, meant be kept in your pocket to refer to when you needed to look up a ‘rule.’ I fell asleep many times while attempting to read this book, grant it that it was sort of a grammar rule book, it possessed little more charm than the dictionary. Much of the book was of the form, “do this…, don’t do this…” The authors provided very short examples of the right and wrong ways to do things. Although this was focused, and therefore perhaps more clearly presented a way to write better, I feel it was lacked a larger view of communication.
I enjoyed reading Williams “Style, Toward Clarity and Grace,” which began with a ‘larger picture’ than Strunk and White. I felt like Williams focused more on answering the question, “how do I communicate better through writing?” whereas Strunk and White focused more on the question, “how do I write sentences correctly?”
It’s not that Williams didn’t eventually break down writing to getting the sentences correct, he did, but, he was not so zoomed into grammar to begin with. Williams provided longer examples of writing, passages, to convey and illustrate each point he made. I especially liked it when he bold-faced the topics in a passage to show how much easier it was to read when the topics of sentences where clear and placed toward the beginning of the sentences. Williams also had a better way of explaining the flow of sentences within a passage and how to arrange the flow of information from oldest to newest knowledge to the reader. Throughout the book he provided little charts of where a part of a sentence structure should exist and I found this more helpful than Strunk and White.
I feel there was greater variety and scope of Williams book over Strunk and White. I felt that Williams felt more comprehensive, even though there was more nebulous information that you couldn’t quite nail down into a short little rule, and short little example (ah, my redundant words, maybe I am doing this for effect Williams), the way Strunk and White made an greater effort to do. However, one good point that for Strunk and White was that I felt their rules were usually precise and easier to follow that Williams rules, perhaps this was because of the way the rules were presented.
