March 4, 2006
Style lesson 3
In Style Lesson Three, Williams discusses actions, explaining to his audience how to make judgments on clarity, and relating telling stories about characters and actions. As he uses a fairy tale as a typical example of subject and action, Williams applies his principles to academic writing. He explains that readers find sentences where the subject does the verb less wordy than sentences where the verb is done by the subject.
Williams goes into detail about nominalization, which he explains by providing examples such as using the verb discover as discovery, careless as carelessness, or proficient as proficiency. When writers nominalize verbs their writing becomes abstract and indirect. Williams teaches his reader how to diagnose bad writing by looking at the first several words of each sentence, and how to revise accordingly by checking for the elements he feels are important.
After specifically explaining how subjects and verbs should be used in sentences, Williams gives his reader more tips about solving the problem of bad writing. As most writers know, writers see their own work quite differently than a peer reader does. The more a person (either reader or writer) knows about a subject, the less clear the writing needs to be. Because writers know more about their writing than readers do, writing that looks clear to the author often looks unclear to the reader. Williams gives his reader a tip about revision- to look first at passages that were difficult to write. When writers have trouble expressing themselves, they usually write in an unclear manner.
In lesson 3 of Style, Williams pinpoints how subject and verb affect clear writing. He teaches his reader how to make subject and verb active in order to create straightforward and clear writing.