Style
Engaging and direct, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is the guidebook for anyone who wants to write well. Williams' and Bizup's clear, accessible style models the kind of writing that audiences–both in college and after–will admire. The principles offered here help writers understand what readers expect and encourage writers to revise to meet those expectations more effectively. This book is all you need to understand the principles of effective writing. • Publisher.
Stats for nerds
38recommend
57mentions
42people
2008–2026years
93% recommend7% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Good writing takes effort.
Clarity - grace - style ... is not taught. Passable text is good enough.
No editor - plus a peer group who create bloated text.
Here is my favorite text on how to write clearly: https://www.amazon.com/Style-Ten-Lessons-Clarity-Grace/dp/03...
I really hope good writing makes a comeback. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time and effort to write well.
- I appreciate what this piece is trying to do directionally but it shares a logical flaw with lots of other pieces about AI and knowledge work. It assumes that in order to disrupt a particular field, AI needs to print serviceable work unassisted; that it's "vibe-shipping".
AI today is most effective when it's not vibing, but rather copiloting a skilled operator. I don't necessarily want my agent to build an entire system for me, even if it's ultimately the author of almost every line of code; I'm actively making decisions throughout. There's obviously a spectrum here but at most points on the spectrum the amount of assistance available is still a step change in the economics.
So too with writing.
The first rule of accelerating writing with AI is that you're not allowed to use a single word the AI suggests. Even if what the model comes up with is great, better than what you could have done, as soon as the AI suggests it it's poisoned. At least with current models, readers can detect LLM prose in the parts per trillion, and as soon as they do you've lost them.
The second rule of writing with AI is that AI encouragement is toxic. A structural consequence of RL is that models are exquisitely tuned to generate responses that make their users perceive value. We recognize this in a gross sense in "sycophancy", but the problem recurs fractally in at finer-grained levels, where stuff like "this part is really strong" will subtly allow the model to set a course for your writing and you'll confidently ship crap.
With those two rules in mind, models are incredibly valuable for writing, more valuable in my experience than the professional copywriters I've worked with. The trick is to get them to make suggestions at a higher level than just writing alternatives:
* Do the sentences in these paragraphs end with the new idea or information?
* Are the real actors in each sentence the grammatical subjects?
* From paragraph to paragraph is there a clear flow of topics, or are things jumping around?
* Is this piece crudded up with metadiscourse like "it's important to note"?
I've had a stack of notecards for ages that I took down from Joseph Williams "Style: Towards Clarity And Grace", the most programmer-brained writing book ever written, I love it very much. For the past year or so I've been feeding them through GPT and Claude one by one, and it's drastically increased the speed at which I can knock out a completed piece.
I think it's pretty hard to argue that AI isn't going to have an impact on the writing profession. It's just not the most obvious impact everyone assumes it will have, where it, like, writes whole op-eds or whatever. At least not yet.
- It's good to combined both to form a sort of palindrome to chain ideas together. This is explained in more detail in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.
- The lecture by Larry McEnerney was a great recommendation, I just watched. When I was in college I had a revelation reading Clarity: Toward Style and Grace by Williams. Really put into concrete terms why some ways of writing "sound wrong" and how to avoid them.
- There are innumerable sources online for improving technical writing and they all generally repeat the same conventions and "rules". I tend to warn people, though, that over fixating on technical writing will not make you a great writer but just a capable technical writer.
If you're looking to improve your writing in general, then I think Joseph Williams' "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" is the single best book on the subject written so far. Rather than simply state certain "rules", it methodically workshops examples to show how you can write and rewrite a sentence to change your meaning and emphasis at will.
- Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow.
The whole idea behind Williams' (and Gopen's and McEnerny's – they are all from the University of Chicago) style is that you should arrange your words so that they sit in the correct positions. Namely something old in the beginning of the sentence (paragraph, section...), something new in the end. Something important in the stress position. Something contextual in the topical position. Etc.
The use of the passive is precisely that it lets you rearrange sentences so that certain parts go in "the other" position, that would be unnatural in an active construction, but that is correct in the logic of the sentence.
This is practical style, by the way. Look up Thomas' and Turner's "Clear and simple as the truth" for a discussion of different styles and a tutorial in "classic style".
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