# Style ## Metadata * Author: [Richard Lanham](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B005PQIRL8 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005PQIRL8 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8) ## Highlights One would like to know at least the boundary conditions of the problem. All that we have now is a growing sense of muddled language, public and private, in which “like” appears every third word and everyone says “You know?” but nobody knows. — location: [153](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=153) ^ref-63439 --- The stupidest and most recalcitrant students of composition usually make the most sensible comment on the course: “Why should I care how I write when nobody else does?” — location: [201](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=201) ^ref-36409 This is a good question to ask of myself as I begin my quest to learn how to write well, starting with this book. --- Oral poetry depended on memorized oral formulae and a series of standard rhythmic patterns, and these remained as an oral ingredient in written literature. — location: [427](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=427) ^ref-30973 patterns in poetry as a way of memorizing more information in oral traditions. --- Familiarity means reassurance. Clarity’s first job is to make us feel at home. We want to see where we are. And it is not simple familiarity of manner that we expect, but of content as well. — location: [700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=700) ^ref-49491 --- Each prose style is itself not only an object seen but a way of seeing, both an intermediate “reality” and a dynamic one. Obviously there can be no single verbal pattern that can be called “clear.” All depends on context—social, historical, attitudinal. — location: [711](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=711) ^ref-12935 --- At the base of prose style, then, we find not only the need to communicate but also the spirit of play, the delight in form for its own sake. — location: [732](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=732) ^ref-28021 It's one thing to argue that clarity is relative, between speaker, context and reader. I agree with that. But that is not equivalent to arguing that you should write prose for the sake of form or aesthetics itself --- “Plainness,” he said, “although simple, is not what I mean by simplicity. Simplicity is a clean, direct expression of that essential quality of the thing which is the nature of the thing itself.” The new NEB translation is plain; the King James Version attains simplicity. Clarity is simple, not plain. — location: [783](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=783) ^ref-34360 --- But what if ornament came first? Ornament is driven by pleasure, not by dos and don’ts and threats of time in the penalty box. That’s the “What if?” I entertained in this chapter. — location: [883](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=883) ^ref-59243 --- Such a distinction depends on the scientific attitude toward prose: all prose cherishes an object outside itself, a concept it must embody. When the language starts to cloud, it goes bad. But on the opaque-style spectrum, which does not render attitudinizing verdicts, it does not. It simply shifts its loyalty elsewhere, shifts it increasingly to the words themselves. Style becomes subject. — location: [1148](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1148) ^ref-44200 The 'clarity' view of prose focuses on some external subject, and argues that rhetoric or ornamentation clouds meaning. He argues that style can itself become the subject. This is demonstrated through awareness of style and almost through playful reference. In my view, since our objective with prose is to convey thoughts & feelings (which are intertwined) style can provide clarity through emotional context and gives it a place in the emotional landscape to put it with. --- A style is a response to a situation. When you call a style bad, or exaggerated, much less mad, you ought to make sure you understand the situation it responds to. You may be objecting to the situation, not to the style invented to cope with it. — location: [1208](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1208) ^ref-15363 --- The scientific stylist pictures a world where life as concepts comes first. The opaque stylist views experience differently: to him, life seems as stylized as literature. Ordinary experience seems fundamentally dramatic, a game of roles in which the self is not so much felt and possessed as presented and reenacted. For such an experience, the most faithful reflection will be a prose style equally contrived, literary, and self-conscious. — location: [1271](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1271) ^ref-20848 --- [Style adds to a thought all the circumstances needed to produce the whole effect which that thought ought to produce]. Are we to commit ourselves to thought with the feeling-tones that surround it or without them? Doing without them, we move toward the right end of the spectrum; with them, we move toward the left, toward Stendhal’s, and our, opaque style. — location: [1323](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1323) ^ref-29072 --- When we say we “don’t notice the style,” we mean only that the particular oscillation succeeds for this work, and the kind of work this work is, and for us who read it. We’re back to the problem with “clarity.” Nobody will argue that it is a bad thing, but it is not a helpful descriptive category. It is simply a notice that, this time, things worked for us. — location: [1407](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1407) ^ref-11287 When we say good style is n't noticeable, it only means that it seamlessly transmitted 'theideasandfeelings,andwedidn'tnoticeit. --- the scientific ideal of clear, conceptual prose The Books dwell upon hasn’t much application among working scientists. If you are a scientist, especially a social one, you had better sound scientific, the more scientific the better. Mills’s clarity sounds so much less scientific than Parsons’s sociologese. Mills’s prose, clear, vigorous, sensible, the best plain prose of the scientific attitude, concentrates its energy on the subject. Parsons’s prose aims to fix our gaze on the sociologist. What a wizard he must be — location: [1464](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1464) ^ref-56484 --- rhetoric is the flattery, the ritual mystification that keeps the outsiders out and the insiders so pleased with themselves. — location: [1480](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1480) ^ref-15578 --- Jargons aim to define situations in flattering ways, and we are, as often as not, included in the flattery. — location: [1514](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1514) ^ref-46550 --- If you kick style out the front door, it will creep in the back. Jargons are all written in the name of “clarity.” A special field demands a special language. But once safely behind this professional fence, the special language grows ever more dense, ever more exclusive, grows so fond of itself that it begins to play, and then to veer off into self-parody. Practitioners write more and more for one another and for the pleasure of using the special terminology. — location: [1887](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1887) ^ref-31745 --- As Peter Drucker has written, a knowledge society “demands for the first time in history that people with knowledge take responsibility for making themselves understood by people who do not have the same knowledge base.” It looked for a while as if the Common Reader of yore had died, but the need to convince those outside your professional language of the importance of what you do has resurrected this audience. — location: [1893](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=1893) ^ref-8585 --- When we begin to read aloud silently, when we become aware of what a text would be like if read aloud, we go a long way to restoring voice to our own writing and hearing the voices of other prose styles. — location: [2163](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=2163) ^ref-15699 --- Writing’s advantage, as a presentation of self, is not that it allows us to adopt the mannerisms of speech but that it allows us to adopt the tempo of speech without its hesitant waste. — location: [2219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=2219) ^ref-23484 --- To play with styles is to play with roles, with ways of thinking and, thus, ways of being. Prose style is always a presentation of self. — location: [2321](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=2321) ^ref-40073 --- if the primary stuff is now information, then style—how this information is communicated to us, the packages it comes in—becomes centrally important. — location: [2511](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005PQIRL8&location=2511) ^ref-32096 ---