ABSTRACT

The traditional view on English style is simply put. Be clear; avoid ornament; let the message reveal itself. From Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century to George Orwell in the twentieth and Elmore Leonard in the twenty-first, writers and literary critics have agreed. Style is not something to be strained for or added on: it is there in the writer – or the subject – waiting to be expressed. What is needed is plainness, decorum, economy, precision – above all, clarity. What is not needed is rhetoric or embellishment.