ABSTRACT
Style is not something to be strained for or added on: it is there in the writer, or the subject, waiting to be expressed. The traditional view on English style is simply put. In the United States the traditional message has been exactly the same. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity. The Americans, who adopted journalism education and training before the British, developed a systematic way of measuring the readability of newspapers and magazines. The journalism trainer Robert Gunning gave his name to the Gunning Fog Index, which sets out to show how obscure writing is. It is the style of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs. But a distinctive style is a great advantage because it can make a reviewer's view of the work easy to grasp and remember.
