Lauren's Style Responses
From Mizzou Wiki
Style Response 1:
In the book Style written by Joseph Williams, the first chapter is about writing clearly. The author focuses on what it takes to write clearly. He also descirbes what the causes of unclear writing are. I enjoyed this reading very much because it showed you a new way to look at your own writing. Some key points that Williams makes is that in order to write clearly you must first understand what you are writing about. He says, "Unclear writing is a social problem, but often has private causes." Another sentence I like alot is, "But I know that many do see clearly, feel deeply, and think carefully but can't write sentences that make their thoughts, feelings, and visions clear to others. I also know that the more clearly we write, the more clearly we see and feel and think." He says the biggest rule is to put your readers ahead of yourself. The purpose of the writing is to help the average person who doesn't feel confident in their writing ability to feel more confident. I think Williams accomplishes this purpose very well. After I read this first chapter I felt more confident to write clearly. Williams understands what it takes from inside the human mind to write clearly. It has to be clear in the mind first in order to be clear on the paper. Williams view on what it takes to write clearly is his opinion and he doesn't share alternative ways but his own. While someone could complain about this and say that is being closed minded I think that Williams has a very good grip on how he has learned to write clearly and how it will work for other people. His ideas made me think a lot about my own writing. I have felt many of the feelings that he describes at the beginning of the chapter. I have felt the confusion of what I am writing about, the writer’s block, and the doubt of if my writing is making sense at all. Williams views helped me take a deeper breath of fresh writing to understand that you must understand first what you want to write to get your thoughts to come out clearly on the paper.
--This first one needed a bit of restructuring, but the one below already looks better. Also, if you're going to use quotes (and you should) give me a page number as citation.
Style Response 2: In chapter 3 of Style written by Joseph Williams his main point again is that you first must understand what is wrong with an unclear sentence before you can know how to make it clear. He begins to tell you how you can do this. First by linking your characters to their actions. There are principles of clarity. the first is to make the main characters the subjects. The second is to make important actions verbs. Williams further explains how what we learned in elementary school about subjects, verbs and objects does not always apply. There are three big parts when it comes to revising a sentence. The three are diagnose, analyze, and rewrite. Williams teaches how to take nominalizations and to make them verbs. Then to make the characters the subjects of those verbs. This acts as a formula for a good, clear sentence that is direct and to the point. He ends his chapter with a quote from Hamlet that reads, "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action."
Williams does a good job of showing his view of how to make a clear sentence. There are more ways to make a clear sentence though. As a beginning writer I am not exactly sure how to do that or how to explain it but I know there have to be more ways than just the way he has described. It is also up to the audience whether the writing is clear. There are multiple levels of clear. Just like there are multiple levels of clean. Who decides if it is clear or clean? As far as if Williams achieved what he was trying to I would definately say yes. He certainly opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about my sentence building. It will certainly take some practice but at least I can grasp what he was saying.
This chapter relates to my life because as a student I am having to learn how to write. I am glad that I got a teacher for English 1000 that is concerned with writing clearly. I really like this book Style as well because it is showing me how to think more clearly. The first chapter was mainly about how you have to get your thoughts and your hands together. First you must understand what you want to say before you can write about what you're thinking. This relates to my life very much because I struggle with getting my thoughts clear enough to put them down clearly on paper. Chapter 3 began explaining to me how to start with baby steps to get my sentences to be more clear.
Style Response 3: In chapter 5 of Style written by Joseph Williams, his main point is cohesion and coherence of a text. Cohesion is where sentences flow from one to another. Coherence is making the whole text flow smoothly. You can think of it by using the analogy of a puzzle. Cohesion is all the seperate puzzle pieces. How all those puzzle pieces fit together to create the picture on the box is coherence. Williams explains how when writing you want to use passive verbs and not active verbs. Doing this allows for the end of the sentence to flow on to the beginning of the next sentence. You also want to start a sentence with information that the reader is familiar with. Another topic that he goes over is how you want to analyze your writing objectively. You already understand your writing so you cannot predict how your readers are going to take in your writing. You must think outside of your writing and think of how the reader is going to percieve your writing.
I really liked Williams' puzzle analogy. With this he is objectively showing a way to understand his ideas. As I have mentioned before there are more ways to make clear sentences than just the ways Williams is showing. Although Williams is showing how to make clear sentences by thinking of the text before you write it. Usually I will write a sentence and then revise it to make it more clear. With the ideas from Williams I can begin to train myself to think of how to write a sentence before I write it. I'm sure you can see that I will need a lot of practice. I think Williams achieves his goals in this book very well. He has very good ideas and he teaches them very well in his book. I understand everything I have read so far.
I connect to this chapter because a big part of the writing process that I struggle with is cohesion and coherence. I can make clear sentences but often times when it comes to putting all those clear sentences into a formal piece of writing I get confused with what I am really trying to say and my piece has no coherence. I will try to think of my piece in more of a puzzle-like way. I will try harder to keep the whole idea of the piece in mind as I write my sentences. I will also try to train myself to use passive verbs so that my sentences can flow better. If I can become better in being cohesive and coherent then the whole feel of my writing will be much better.
--Keep in mind, that, as we would have read in Chapter 2, he thinks passives are ok. Some teachers do not, and there's not a clear-cut reasoning for either camp. Good response.
Style Response 4
In chapter 7 of Style, Joseph Williams makes his point about concision. He mentions that an important part of writing is keeping your sentences concise but shapely at the same time. In doing this, sentences are direct but they have depth at the same time. Williams explains six principles of concision. Williams explains how to delete meaningless and doubled words from sentences. He also says to take out what readers can already infer in a text. He speaks of redundancy and how to not have it in your writing. It is a good idea to replace a phrase with a word to make your sentence shorter and to the point. Also to change negatives to affirmatives. Negatives add extra words. Lastly, to delete adjectives and adverbs. Using all these principles in your writing will make more sense to you and your reader. Williams mentions metadiscourse. His advice is to take out most metadiscourse, but you still need some in every writing. Metadiscourse helps the text to flow more smoothly from topic to topic.
In Williams' explanation of principle four, which was replacing phrases with words, he says that he has no principle to tell you what phrases to replace with what words. He says the best way to do this is to try. It is hard as the writer to know what is going to make sense to your reader. This concept is hard for me. If my writing makes sense to me I want to keep it the way it is though my reader may not understand what I'm writing. This whole book so far has shown me how to think of the reader before I think of myself. This is hard. Often times you won't even know who your readers are. Everyone has different ways of reading and writing. If I memorized and practiced these six principles my writing would be much better. --Ooo. I don't think that's what he wants...--
I think Williams does a good job of explaining and showing with many examples what he is trying to get across. His ideas seem good to me, and I think if I used what he is teaching, my writing would become much more clear. I would be able to understand my writing better. And with that, my reader would understand my writing. Sometimes, I think Williams can be opinionated and think closemindedly, but he is just trying to show his point of view for his ideas for writing. He never says that this is the only way to do something. This makes for a good book on how to make writing more clear.
--good here. You've blended the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs a bit, but you should also remember that his book is about "guidelines" and "priniciples", not RULES.
Last Style Response Chapter 10:
Overall, I liked this book. Joseph Williams does a very good job of showing and explaining what clear writing is and looks like. I still don't quite know how to make my writing more clear though. The best way I can think to make my writing more clear is to use the lesson he taught by thinking of my reader before I think of myself. In chapter 10 he reiterates this lesson when he says "write to others as you would have others write to you". He also explains how the reader has responsibility to read closely. It would be impossible for an engineer to write a mathmatical and complex paragraph clearly for everyone to understand. There has to be a balance for the reader and the writer.
Williams talks about how to respond to complex writings and writers. Often times writers will claim that they must write in a complex style because they are writing innovatively. Readers should not have to sit and decode every word and sentence to understand a reading. There isn't enough time for that. Williams says, "we ought not assume that they owe us an indefinite amount of their time to unpack it." I like this a lot because even though there is some respect to unpacking loaded sentences, a sentence would have a lot more meaning if it could be said clearly and have all the meaning intact without having to to "unpack" it. The Declaration of Indepence is made of loaded sentences. If you were truly wanting the full meaning of that document you would have to sit for a good while to figure out every sentence. Williams describes that Thomas Jefferson used language instead of his argument for this whole document. I believe this is, for the most part, true. I think that all the ideas are still very much Jefferson's and that the language helped him very much.
The first chapter of this book was the most influential for me. I feel like Williams repeated his ideas from the first chapter throughout the whole book. I realize that the first chapter was setting up the whole book but I was not too plugged in to the rest of the chapters. I really did like the first chapter though. I still don't quite know how to really apply the knowledge I got from this book to my writing but I know that when I am writing I am thinking about the things that Williams talked about throughout this book. I hope that my style, as I continue to develop one, will make sense to my readers and I hope that it is clear. I hope that my writing is not awful and I hope that it will continue to get better.
