maddispatch

But you will be impatient to find a “style”—to embellish the plain words so that readers will recognize you as someone special. You will reach for gaudy similes and tinseled adjectives, as if “style” were something you could buy at the style store

All of the features of classic style pertain: the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the scene is informal, language is adequate, truth can be known, speaker and hearer are competent, and so on.

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

I find imagery—and if anyone tells us not to use imagery, deeming it allowable only for poets, I think he must not have read even one of our older writers. For them, stylistic decorum was not yet the constant aim: they expressed themselves simply and in such a way as to get their point across.

Style is all about delivery, and it is a blend of clarity, kindness, and refinement. Your Style is about purity of expression, and requires you overcome the human tendency to imitate others. Style also has a direct relationship to substance, and it needs to complement it and match it, just as one must feel good in the clothes that one wears. Your

Style is what happens as a result of how you solve a given problem.

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