Thursday 5 July 2007

Style

Huge subject for a few minutes.

Am I referring to your few minutes or mine? Mine in the first instance. But if I do not hold dear your time and attention---bad style!

Note my first paragraph above is a sentence without a main verb. I could have started thus:

It is a huge subject for a few minutes.

or even

Writing style is a huge subject for a few minutes.

Yawn-worthy!

Suppressing the redundant is the essence of style. Obviously I mean good style, but "good" was redundant too.

We have covered these rules:

Be brief
Prune
Illustrate
Exemplify
See reader's viewpoint

There's more but I have another rule: don't be exhaustive.

1 comments:

Sophia said...

You're right. Sometimes being perfect in our sentences can be boring. It's nice to break the rules every now and then just for some variety!