Comparing Strunk and White with Williams

Style Toward Clarity and Grace focuses on a different aspect of writing than The Elements of Style. The former introduces common sense style guidelines. Struck and White's The Elements of Style covers use cases of the English language. The discussion of style in Struck and White is too concise. It lacks examples of modern writing, and common errors. I previously wrote "Elements of Style includes some useful material. Chapter one covers basic usage of colons, semicolons, hyphens, and other elements. As I have not reviewed basic grammar rules for well over ten years, it was beneficial to review the material." The Williams book does not cover usage of punctuation, but it includes preferred uses of words and phrases as well as recommendations for sentence, paragraph and document structure.

Williams offers excellent advice. Sentence and paragraph structure is covered in great detail. The chapters "Cohesion", "Coherence I" and "Coherence II" diagram sentence structure and the relationship of sentences within paragraphs. Williams offers historical explanations for writing style rules from other texts. My favorite explanation deals with proper rules for "good English" in chapter ten.

3. Finally, some grammarians try to impose on those who already write educated standard English particular items of usage that they think those educated writers should observe--don't split infinitives; use that, not which for restrictive clauses; use fewer, not less for countable nouns; don't use hopefully to mean I hope. These are matters that few speakers and writers of nonstandard English worry about. They are, however, items about which educated writers disagree.

Williams 176

In this section, Williams has a commentary on writers who impose their rules of writing on others. Struck created the text to teach freshmen his rules. Williams essentially argued against Struck's approach. Williams greatest contribution is the idea that the absence of style is recognized; good writing is not detectable because of the application of rules.

Struck and White offer a reference to aid writers in selecting the best words and punctuation. The book uses concise sentences, brief examples, and whitespace to ease readers in finding information much like a dictionary or encyclopedia. It is very useful if one is familiar with English grammar. The book suggests areas to improve in style. "1. Place yourself in the background" (Struck and White 70) Suggestions often take the form of rules with numerals assigned to each. Grammar can be learned by applying rules, but style is an abstract concept; rules do little to help grasp such ideas. Style is not a finite space that can be determined like the proof of a math problem or the source code to a computer program.