Joseph M. Williams (1933–2008) was an American rhetorician and linguist at the University of Chicago whose work on prose style transformed how clarity is taught and practiced.
Core ideas
- Characters and actions: Williams argued that clear prose puts characters (the agents of a sentence) in subject position and their actions in verb position. When writers nominalize actions (“the investigation of the case”) instead of using verbs (“we investigated the case”), readers work harder for less understanding [@williams2006].
- Known-new contract: effective sentences move from information the reader already knows to information that is new. This creates cohesion between sentences and coherence across paragraphs.
- The metadiscourse problem: writers often add words about the writing process itself (“It is important to note that…”) rather than stating the point. Williams’s method systematically identifies and cuts this layer.
- Elegance as earned: Williams treated elegance not as decoration but as the result of clear structure. A sentence becomes elegant when its shape matches its meaning — when emphasis falls where the reader needs it.
Notable works
- Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (1981; many subsequent editions, later with Joseph Bizup)
- Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (1990) — the condensed version
- The Craft of Argument (2003, with Gregory Colomb)
Related
- plain language writing — Williams’s principles underlie much of the vault’s plain language specification
- Richard Lanham — a contemporary who developed complementary approaches to prose revision