Joseph M. Williams

Joseph Williams taught at the University of Chicago. His Style books treat clear prose as a learnable craft of subject-verb-object alignment, old-to-new information flow, and cohesive paragraphs.

¶Core ideas

• Characters as subjects, actions as verbs: the core diagnostic for unclear sentences
• Old-new information flow: begin sentences with familiar material, end with new
• Cohesion vs coherence: sentence-to-sentence linkage vs whole-document logic

¶Key works

• Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (1981, many editions)
• The Craft of Argument (with Gregory Colomb, 2001)
• The Craft of Research (with Booth and Colomb, 1995)