When asked to come up with a style rule, it was not a difficult task because my mind automatically went to what intrigued me most about reading The Elements of Style and Style Toward Clarity and Grace. (author? what is this book and what is its importance? The thought of sentence stress sounded familiar, yet totally new at the same time. Because I couldn’t quite comprehend what the authors were trying to relay about this important topic, I had to reread the sections where this was described multiple times. Luckily, after doing this brief kind of research, I was able to sum up what the authors were saying and combine it into my own rule that I find more understandable. "that I understand better"...? reword the end maybe I think this intro is a little weak. Maybe you could state your rule here.

Although this notion of sentence stress is mentioned in both books, it is explored in much greater depth in Williams’s Style Toward Clarity and Grace. In this book, each stylistic rule is neatly put into the appropriately titled chapter. It is then explained in great detail and accompanied by even greater detailed examples. Although the examples can become tediously long, they really (remove really...needless word) serve their purpose of trying to get the reader to truly understand and internalize each rule. The reader is forced to walk away with some kind of knowledge about each rule. It is not like in most high school English classes where the material is thrown at you and is expected to stick. After spending so much time reading about the rules, Williams knows that the reader is bound to take away some kind of knowledge. (great introduction to Williams' book here!)

Williams finds the concept of sentence stress so important that he dedicates all of chapter four to the purpose of explaining it; he even titles the chapter “Emphasis”. In this chapter, Williams starts off with a short but wonderfully summarized statement. He says, “If you begin a sentence well, the end will almost take care of itself” (67). This statement is part of the reason that I was so drawn to this chapter. It almost seems to be commonsense, yet it is something that most writers sometimes fail to keep in mind, myself included. It also seems to take something as technical as writing and make it seem more accessible and less overwhelming. this quote stuck with me too!

In his chapter about emphasis, Williams gives the reader more practical advice by discussing such things as how to make sentence endings appropriately convey the intended message and ways to “add weight to the end of a sentence” (71). Lastly, the chapter is wrapped up by some of the more technical ideas about sentence emphasis, such as how to write for an audience that is more familiar with a topic as compared to one that is not.
When I turned to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style for more contribution on my developing style rule, I was not able to get as much help. This book functions more on the premise of quantity versus quality than on Williams' idea of quality and less quantity. In other words, Strunk and White do an excellent job in listing many different stylistic rules; however they do not take the time to explain them in as great of lengths as Williams does in his style guide. Fortunately, I did not necessarily find this to be a negative quality since the reader is spared pages of tediously long examples. I just wish that the two men would have included a bit more on my topic of emphasis.

Nevertheless, Strunk and White do have something to say about emphasis. Tucked into the end of Chapter 2: Elementary Principals of Composition, there is a helpful and straight-to-the-point overview of my topic. They start the section with the statement, “The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the writer desires to make most prominent is usually the end” (52). In their dry tone of language they end the section with some examples and other helpful tips about how to best place new information into a sentence.
As I stated before, I was really intrigued by this whole notion of sentence emphasis. While I am sure that I learned the concept at one point during my many years of English instruction, for some reason the idea never really perceptibly stuck in my mind. While it seems like such an easy and obvious idea, it is something that I think a writer needs to actively take into account when they are writing.
I really owe my inspiration for my style rule to Williams’s Style Toward Clarity and Grace. Even though I read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style prior to Wiliams’s book, it was Williams who really got me thinking about the topic. For some reason, my mind couldn’t focus on the manner in which Strunk and White worded their explanation. To me, nothing significant really stuck out above the rest of the information that they provide to the reader.
To form my style rule I had to almost completely forget which book said what, and just focus on the overall impression that I got about the topic. I had to focus on what I had learned (or relearned in my case) and pick out what I thought was the most important and easiest rules for any writer, no matter their level. This is when I came up with the rule that “When writing a sentence, the main and most important idea should be at the end of the sentence”.
What I gathered from the readings was that this would allow readers to easily focus on the main topic of the sentence. This would also give the reader a better chance of remembering that focus because it would be the last thing that they read. Although this may be an overly simplified version of something that Strunk and White and Williams took many more pages to say, to me, this is what the whole concept is really about.
The whole notion of sentence emphasis, or stress was so new and interesting to me that I decided to create my style rule around it. Although undoubtedly I have probably learned about this concept at one point in my educational career, I have never focused on it is such a great extent. By gathering my research from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Williams’s Style Toward Clarity and Grace, I was able to create a rule that I thought anyone could easily put into practice, most of all myself. You make great points about the two books, but I'm unsure how to incorporate your rule into my writing.

White, E.B. and William Strunk. The Elements of Style. New York: Longman, 2000.
Williams, Joseph. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995