In classic style, opinions stated clearly and distinctly are treated as if they can be verified by simple observation. The writer does not typically attempt to persuade by argument. The writer merely puts the reader in a position to see whatever is being presented and suggests that the reader will be able to verify it because the style treats

You are making an inference, for example, when you think that someone “looks disappointed.” The fact that the “disappointment” is an inference rather than something perceptible often goes unnoticed. We have to remind ourselves that a common phrase such as “You could see disappointment all over his face” is not literally true. The paradox is that

In our experience, blackbirds are quite different from aspirations, but grammatically, “blackbirds” and “aspirations” belong to the same category. Nouns like confidence, religion, nation, aspiration, and money already prompt us to structure complicated concepts as things. In the structured version, they are all things that you can recognize. Single

Since Auerbach’s measure of stylistic maturity values writing to the extent that it penetrates through local and individual human purpose to historicist truth, he naturally discounts the individual purposes of writers as impediments to the representation of truth. The more a writer includes and the less he selects according to his own purpose, the

Truth is pure, eternal, not contingent. Jefferson’s sentence hangs there like a star. It is true that his sentence is a response to a particular occasion, but he chooses to meet that occasion with something that does not depend upon occasion. What he expresses is grounded in something that was always there and that will always abide: we are endowed

It is possible for Auerbach to see a particular writer such as Saint-Simon as an almost miraculous mutation exhibiting the shape of the future: “In his level of style, Saint-Simon is a precursor of modern and ultra-modern forms of conceiving and representing life.” Truth, for Auerbach, is not the property of an individual, indeed not essentially

It is missing just one thing, namely, an explicit acknowledgment of its fundamental stand, and an acknowledgment that its fundamental stand is one of many alternatives. While their work is thorough, systematic, and theoretically sophisticated, and while they know that they are dealing with just one style, the work is misleading in its

Whether style is viewed as spiritual, fraudulent, or something in between, any concept of style that treats it as optional is inadequate not only to writing but to any human action. Nothing we do can be done “simply” and in no style, because style is something inherent in action, not something added to it. In this respect, style is like the

Most writing in schools and colleges is a perversion of practical style: the student pretends that he is writing a memorandum. He pretends that he knows more than the reader, that the reader needs this information, and that his job is to impart that information in a way that is easy for the reader to parse. This pretense is supposed to be practice