A brief text for students who wish to refine and improve their expository writing style. Concentrates on sentence construction and effective word choice.

From the Author

A new kind of style book.
My editor and I had a few pointed exchanges concerning the audience for Understanding Style. He thought of it as a college writing textbook. But I kept imagining, and writing for, crossover readers indulging an interest in style--in fact, the kind of people who make up the literary community at Amazon.com.

I was sure I had something new and valuable to offer such readers. Although the book discusses traditional topics such as modes of good and bad writing, diction, coherence, and sentence structure and variety, its newest thinking contains concerns the "sound" of writing, especially ways writers can control sentence rhythms and emphasis. To quote a bit from my own preface:

These are precisely the kinds of issues that give style its reputation as a difficult topic. Would this sentence sound better turned around the other way? Is this clause too long to read gracefully? How can you keep important words from being buried under less important ones? Though questions like these concerning the sound of writing are crucial to understanding style, most books leave them to linguists--who in fact have answers for many of them. Several of the . . . chapters adapt the findings of linguistic research into detailed writing advice seldom found elsewhere, advice that can give you new confidence in dealing with the hidden choices and adjustments that make your style come to life.

The book also offers plenty of open-ended exercises useful to individual readers, a handy list of stylistic rules of thumb, a short usage dictionary, and a punctuation guide. I hope you'll try it.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

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