Style (writing)

“ A style in writing, if not formed in express imitation of some certain model, is the pure result of the disposition of the mind, and takes its character from the predominant quality of the writer. Thus a short and compact, and a diffused and flowing expression are the proper consequences of certain corresponding characters of the human genius. One has a vigorous comprehensive conception, and therefore collects his sense into few words. ”

“ Style is a constant and continual phrase or tenour of speaking and writing, extending to the whole tale or process of the poem or history, and not properly to any piece or member of a tale; but is of words, speeches, and sentences together; a certain contrived form and quality, many times natural to the writer, many times his peculiar bye-election and art, and such as either he keepeth by skill or holdeth on by ignorance, and will not or peradventure cannot easily alter into any other. ”

“ Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge; the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent. For the style is the man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also. ”

“ When we condemn writing that is wordy, or confused, or intricate—when we praise this style as easy, and blame that as fatiguing, we consciously or unconsciously assume this desideratum as our standard of judgment. ”

“ It follows from all this that there is no model style, and that the kind of style demanded in any composition depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of good writing is that it should be an expression of a man’s self,—a reflected image of his own character. ”

“ Style, as the word is commonly understood, is the choice and arrangement of words in sentences and of sentences in paragraphs as that arrangement is effective in expressing our meaning and convincing our readers or hearers. A good style is one that is effective, and a bad style is one which fails of doing what the writer wishes to do. ”

“ I am also convinced that the imitation of style in writing, pursued methodically, enables a man to express his own thoughts with facility, propriety of colouring, exactitude of phrase and term, according to the variety of images, grave or gay, familiar or dignified, which we desire to develop and to communicate under their true aspect in prose or poetry. ”

“ a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. ”

“ Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the reader,—I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at those doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste, intervenes. ”

“ In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art. ”

“ As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm—the form in all its characteristics.
If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal." ”

“ 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it —whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.'
But let me plead further that you have not been left altogether without clue to the secret of what Style is. ”

“ What the faculty of feeling is to the artist, what the sense of proportion is to the architect, the gift of style is to the writer. Style is the witchery of words; style is clothing thought in captivating language. ”

“ It is style which insures duration to the work, and fame to the poet. Beauty of expression embellishes beauty of thought, and preserves it; it is at the same time an ornament and armor~ Style, to the idea, is like enamel to the tooth. ”

“ His own sense of all this, as I have already indicated, was that beauty comes with expression, that expression is creation, that it makes the reality, and only in the degree in which it is, exquisitely, expression; and that we move in literature through a world of different values and relations, a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it, and in which the image is thus always superior to the thing itself. ”

“ When we regard the theory of style from the standpoint of recent psychology, a whole series of problems are seen to be involved—the nature of literary genius, association by similarity and its relation to the feelings, and connected with all these—and offering, perhaps, the best point of attack for our present purpose—the functioning of the creative imagination. ”

“ And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature. ”

“ Style is that subtle atmosphere pervading literary, artistic and handicraft work that suggests the cultivated personality of the author. It is not a usual nor a clear conception of style to consider the term as applicable to inferior work. ”

“ Style may have indeed a certain aesthetic worth in partial abstraction from the particular matter it conveys, as in a well-built sentence you may take pleasure in the build almost apart from the meaning. Even then style is expressive—presents to sense, for example, the order, ease, and rapidity with which ideas move in the writer's mind—but it is not expressive of the meaning of that particular sentence. ”

“ Style, in its highest development, belongs only to the finest art of literature; and it must be admitted that literature is not always, nor even perhaps most frequently, a fine art. Of the four rhetorical moods, or methods, of discourse, exposition lends itself the least to the assistance of the quality of style. ”

“ As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a fact, in certain writers—the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. ”

“ To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason—insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action—true, most of all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence. ”

“ In each case language is made the bearer of the writer's personality. Style in literature is the breathing forth of soul and spirit; as is the soul, and as is the spirit in depth, sympathy, and power, so will the style be rich, distinctive, and memorable. Professor Raleigh says that "All style is gesture—the gesture of the mind and of the soul. ”

“ In subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the logical structure:—how wholesome! ”

“ In the effort to explain the principles of an art so bewildering in its variety, writers on style have gladly availed themselves of analogy from the other arts, and have spoken, for the most part, not without a parable. ”

“ As literature, it has a finish that is quite surprising. Art is said to be the elimination of the superfluous. Surely, then, this is artful, in the best sense of that word, to a supreme degree. It is surprising how few repetitions there are, how few tergiversations, how few unnecessary words; and yet the style is not so austere as to be dry and lacking in human interest. ”

“ Moreover, the poet’s style is itself in general the product of the same personality which determines his image of life, and must therefore be, like his image of life, delicately striated with the markings of his play of thought and feeling and fancy. ”

“ Now whatever may be the result of my experiment in the subjects which I have chosen for poetical composition—be they vulgar or be they not,—I can say without vanity, that I have bestowed great pains on my style, full as much as any of my contemporaries have done on theirs. I yield to none in love for my art. I, therefore, labour at it with reverence, affection, and industry. ”

“ The world moves on. Manners, customs, habits, moralities, ideals, all change with changing of the times.
Style alone, the imaginative rendering in monumental words of the most personal secrets of our individuality, gives undying interest to what men write. ”

“ Even the humorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining in less emphatic passages a stray lire or word of power, as it seems, so that we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand has glanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of the style. ”

“ In a great writer the style is the man,—the man as made by his ancestors, his education, his career, his circumstances, and his genius.
It is idle, then, to attempt to secure a good style by imitating this or that writer; for the best part of a good style is incommunicable. An imitator may, if he applies himself closely to the task, catch mannerisms and reproduce defects, and perhaps superficial merits; but most valuable qualities, those that have their root in character, he will miss altogether, except in so far as his own personality resembles that of his model. ”

“ It will form your style as a writer. That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. ”

“ You may mark as you please, but don’t violate the commands of Style. I may seem to disappear for a time, when there is a great rush of work, and you may perhaps bring yourself to believe that Style is dead. But do not deceive yourself,—Style never dies. ”

“ The finest elements of the style, however, are its subtleties of statement and representation, subtleties which follow the most intricate windings and enfoldings of complex thought, speeding on the fire track of an ideal allusion to the very limits of its course, and thoroughly mastering all the obstacles of expression in giving form to the most evanescent workings of the creative power. ”

“ The charm of style, the sweetness of mind it displayed, the keenness of insight into character, and the daintiness of description caused the literary world to realise that a writer of extraordinary merit had risen as a star on the horizon. ”

“ His imagery, though never obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. It is so inevitable, however, springs so organically from the thought and the mood of the moment, that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is conscious only of grasping, easily and securely, the writer’s meaning. He must first look back through the sentences and study the style in detail before he will come to realize its continual, but decisive, divergence from the literal and commonplace, and its essential freshness and distinction. ”

“ As we have just seen, style is affected in a measure by the species of discourse. It is determined, further, by the mental constitution of the writer, and varies according to the dominance of particular faculties. We may distinguish four generic types of mind, which are reflected in four fundamental differences of style. ”

“ The thought of style, considered as an end in itself, has rarely, if ever, been present with him, his sole purpose being to express ideas as clearly as possible, and, when the occasion called for it, with as much force as might be. ”

“ It is surprising how few men understand that Style is a Fine Art; and how few of those who are fastidious in their diction give much care to the arrangement of their sentences, paragraphs, and chapters—in a word, to Composition. ”

“ I could go on naming hosts who have styles distinct by power or affectation, for it is in the style that we show our affectation, as we do it in our walking and our talking; but I would only say that if you wish to be natural and great, think very little upon the style you would take, and more upon the thought you wish to express; be earnest in your work, and by earnestness you will forget your delivery, and so be both natural and original. ”