Does Style Matter in Nonfiction Writing?

If you want to publish, it does.

In the transition from a dissertation to a published book, the biggest problem that Ph.D. graduates often face is prose style. To be more specific, they find that they paid virtually no attention to style while dissertating. It can be a bit of a shock when a book publisher cares about how a manuscript is written.

I don’t say this to be critical of doctoral students. I was certainly one who paid little attention to the art of writing until I tried to publish my dissertation as a book.

This problem is built into the dissertation process. Expertise, evidence, and argument are typically the standards by which a faculty committee judges a dissertation. The faculty may be pleasantly surprised to find that the dissertation is well written, and obviously a passable dissertation needs to be free of grammatical and spelling errors.

But prose style is generally not a major focus when we evaluate a dissertation.

Some professors also have little experience themselves writing for a “general audience.” Maybe they have only published academic journal articles, or maybe a niche monograph, but they haven’t thought much about writing for people who don’t have a Ph.D. in the field. Obviously such professors are not going to offer much help in prose styling.

But even some advisers who do write for a general audience may set aside prose issues simply to get the student across the doctoral “finish line.”

Depending on your doctoral program, it may be more or less common for graduates to publish their dissertations as books. But if you have any notion that you might publish it someday, you will save yourself time (and produce a more readable dissertation) if you attend to prose style sooner rather than later.

How do you improve prose style? The classic work on the subject is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style [affiliate link]. In fact, one of the first hints that I was not great at prose style was when I was visiting potential doctoral programs and spoke with the historian Brooks Holifield at Emory University. I sent him a paper from my Master’s program, and asked if he had any feedback on it. The first thing he said was, “Are you familiar with Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style?” Yowza!

Also, you should pay attention to the actual prose of your favorite writers. You should examine their actual sentence structure, shape of paragraphs, etc. Two of my all-time favorites are books by George Marsden (my doctoral adviser) and Edmund Morgan, who not coincidentally was one of Marsden’s professors at Yale.

You won’t go wrong with any of these authors’ books, but you could start with Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop and Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture.

Finally, you are not likely to become a master prose stylist by the end of a doctoral program, but there are some relatively simple changes you can make. These include reducing passive voice, complex sentences, and block quotes. None of these are necessarily incorrect, but they don’t make for good reading.

Passive voice: This is the difference between “It was decided that the French army should invade Russia” and “Napoleon decided to invade Russia.” The latter (active voice) is preferable, as it concisely clarifies who is performing the action.

There may be times when passive voice is ok, such as “President Kennedy was assassinated.” The main point here is likely Kennedy’s death, and not the (somewhat disputed) fact that Lee Harvey Oswald shot him. But the default voice should be active.

Microsoft Word and other word processors can readily identify passive voice with their editor functions, so you shouldn’t have a problem finding instances of passive voice in your manuscript.

Overly complex sentences: Here I am grabbing content from the Readable blog. A typical graduate student sentence (about zombie fiction!) might say

“There is currently a lively, ongoing controversy among many sociologists and other professionals who study human nature: theories are being spun and arguments are being conducted among them about what it means that so many young people—and older people, for that matter—who live in our society today are so very interested in stories about zombies.”

This is a technically correct sentence, but it is a terrible one stylistically. Readable suggests an edit that deletes passive voice and reduces wordiness by more than half.

“A lively societal debate rages among the human sciences. The contentious issue is: why are so many people fascinated by zombie fiction?”

In general, you want to limit sentences to no more than two clauses. Don’t be afraid to write active sentences with just one clause either.

Block quotes: Especially when studying a brilliant writer, it can be tempting to let their prose fill up your pages. But think about it: how often do you read block quotes when you come across them in your own reading? If a reader skims anything, they skim block quotes.

There certainly are times when a block quote is warranted, but I wouldn’t recommend using more than one per chapter. When you use them, you should conclude the paragraph by explaining what the quote means and what the reader should take from it.

Instead of block quotes, consider quoting the essential sentence from the passage. Explain the rest in your own words.

If you can keep a few basic principles of prose styling in mind, you can produce a more readable manuscript. Doing that will also put you closer to publishing the dissertation as a book.