STYLE: As A WRITER AND A SPEAKER

Let me share with you what John Burrough, the American Naturalists & Essayist(1837–1921) wrote. It is on “Style”, but it is worth mentioning here. “The difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an essential difference — not a difference of substance, but an arrangement of the particles — the crystallization. In substance, the charcoal and the diamond are one, but in form and effect, how widely they differ? The pearl contains nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster shell.”

Two men have the same thoughts, they use about the same words in expressing them, yet with one the product is real literature, with the other it is platitude.

The difference is all in presentation; a finer and more compendious process has gone on in the one case than in other. The elements are better fused and knitted together, they are in some way heightened and intensified is not here a clue to what we mean by style?

Style transforms common quartz into Egyptian pebbles. We are apt to think of style as something external that can be put on, something in and of itself.

But it is not. It is in the inmost texture of the substance itself. Polish, those words, faultless rhetoric, are only the accidents of style.

Indeed,perfect workmanship is one thing, style, as the great writers have it, is quite another. It may, and often does, go with faulty workmanship it is the choice of words in the fresh and vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of anew spiritual force and personality in the best work the style is found and hidden in the matter.”