Growing With Style

Growing With Style

Defining writing style is somewhat like describing Big Foot. People study it, and talk about it, they try to enlighten others about it. But when it’s all said and done, you just rely on; “I’ll know it when I see it.” Style is not unique onto ourselves, but I think that we all, either as audience or as writer, have our own interpretation of style. For example, the University of Miami’s Philosophy and Literature Departments hold a Bad Writing Contest that gives mock prizes to the “worst published academic writing” that someone can find (Miami.edu). It is all in good fun and it is based solely on the opinions of the judges of the contest.

The texts, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Williams and Elements of Style by Strunk and White teach about the importance of “good style.” Both books are quite different in their approach and the style in which it is presented. Strunk and White is short and sweet. Williams is lengthy and often times a tedious read. Both books are biased to their opinions; Williams is more instructional while Strunk and White almost sounds like a reprimand. However, both books offer up a wealth of knowledge and support.

Both Williams and Strunk and White discuss the idea of clarity. Clarity is an important element of style because without it, you will have a lost or disinterested audience. Strunk and White state, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts”(23). Keeping this in mind will help a writer to stay on track. Instead of digressing on an unrelated topic, the writer can focus on a point and stick to it.

Williams has two principles that help with managing and expressing a flow of ideas in a concise manner:

1. Usually, compress what you mean into the fewest words.

2. Don’t state what your reader can easily infer (115).

A writer can achieve meaning compression by eliminating such things as redundant pairs (full and complete, true and accurate) and redundant modifiers (completely finish, past memories) (116). Some of these examples are so common in our speech that we can fail to see them as a problem in our prose.