The four principles, as Williams states them
In Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph Williams sets out four principles of clarity. Two govern the individual sentence; two govern how sentences flow together.
| The principle | |
|---|---|
| Sentence | Make important actions into verbs. |
| Sentence | Make the main characters the subjects of your sentences. |
| Flow | Begin sentences with old or familiar information; put new or unfamiliar information later. |
| Flow | Begin sentences with simple information; put complex information later. |
His reasoning for the flow principles is a claim about how reading works: we learn by connecting new information to what we already know, so readers prefer to meet the familiar before the unfamiliar. The fourth principle follows from the third — what is familiar to a reader feels simple, and what is unfamiliar feels complex.
Why this is an IELTS criterion in disguise
IELTS Coherence and Cohesion asks for logical progression of information, and marks writing down when the reader has to work to follow it. That is a description of the same phenomenon from the other side.
Watch it work. Same content, same facts, same vocabulary — only the order changes.
Each sentence starting with new information (correct English; hard to follow):
Traffic congestion is a serious problem. Private cars are the main cause. Road space is used inefficiently by them. Buses and trams are a better use of that space. Underfunding affects those systems in most cities.
Old information first, new information last (same facts, flows):
Traffic congestion is a serious problem in most large cities. The main cause is private cars, which carry few people but occupy a great deal of road space. That space could be used far more efficiently by buses and trams — and those systems are exactly the ones that remain chronically underfunded.
The second version contains almost no linking words. It flows because each sentence begins by picking up what the previous one put down. This is what examiners mean by logical progression, and it is what candidates try — and fail — to fake with moreover and furthermore.
It also explains why linking words fail
The band descriptors warn about over-using cohesive devices, and treat mechanical linking as a band 6 feature. That warning makes much more sense once you see Williams' principle.
A linking word is a label on a join. If the information is already ordered correctly, the join is obvious and the label is unnecessary. If the information is ordered badly, the label does not fix it — it just announces a connection the reader cannot feel.
Moreover between two sentences that do not follow from each other does not create flow. It creates the impression of someone trying to create flow, which is precisely what an examiner is trained to notice.
So the fastest way to raise this criterion is subtractive: delete half your linking words, and fix the order underneath them. See Coherence & Cohesion, band by band.
Why you cannot find this in your own writing
Williams is unusually honest about the catch, and it is the reason this principle is easy to agree with and hard to apply. His observation: you can spot a violation of old-before-new in someone else's prose far more easily than in your own — because "after you've worked on your own ideas for a while, they all seem familiar — to you."
That is the whole difficulty in one sentence. Old-before-new is defined relative to the reader's knowledge, and you are not the reader. Every idea in your essay is old information to the person who just thought of it, so the order always feels fine from the inside.
It is the same problem that makes you unable to proofread your own typos, and the same one that makes self-assessing your speaking unreliable — you read what you meant, not what you wrote.
How to actually do it
Williams' technique is mechanical, which is what makes it usable under exam pressure.
- Look at the end of your sentence. What is the newest, most important thing in it?
- Start the next sentence with that thing — as a pronoun (this, these, it), a demonstrative (that space, such systems), or a short restatement.
- Put your new information at the end of that sentence.
- Repeat.
The other half of his advice is to keep the subject of your sentence as the character doing something — real actors doing real actions, rather than abstract nouns sitting still.
| Abstract and heavy | Actor doing an action |
|---|---|
| There was an expectation on the part of the government that a reduction in emissions would occur. | The government expected emissions to fall. |
| The implementation of the policy resulted in an improvement in air quality. | The policy improved air quality. |
The right column is shorter and clearer — and it also scores better on vocabulary, because precision is what Lexical Resource rewards. One technique, two criteria.
For the test, and for real writing
For the test: order your information old-to-new, keep a real actor as your subject, and let the flow come from the order rather than the linkers. That is a direct hit on Coherence and Cohesion, and it helps Lexical Resource on the way past.
For real writing: this is the whole point of the book, and it does not stop being true when you leave the exam hall. A report, an email, a proposal — anything a busy person has to read — becomes dramatically easier to follow when the sentences are chained this way. It is one of the few pieces of writing craft that genuinely transfers everywhere.
Williams was not writing for candidates. He was writing for people who need to be read and understood. That the exam happens to be measuring the same thing is a piece of luck — take it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the old-to-new principle?
The idea, from Joseph Williams' Style, that a sentence should begin with information the reader already has and end with the information that is new. Chained across a paragraph, this makes the text pull the reader forward. Break it and every sentence forces the reader to stop and re-orient, even when each one is grammatically perfect.
How does this relate to IELTS Coherence and Cohesion?
It is essentially the same thing described from the other side. The criterion asks for logical progression of information and penalises writing the reader has to work to follow. Old-to-new ordering is what produces that progression, which is why a well-ordered paragraph flows with almost no linking words in it.
So should I stop using linking words?
Use far fewer. A linking word is a label on a join: if the information is ordered well, the join is obvious and the label is unnecessary; if it is ordered badly, the label does not fix it. The band descriptors warn against over-using cohesive devices, and mechanical linking is a band 6 marker.
Is Style worth reading if I only care about the exam?
The principle in this article is the part that pays immediately. But the book was written for people who need to be read and understood at work, and that need does not end with the test — this is one of the few pieces of writing craft that transfers to everything you write afterwards.