But hang on! Adjectives make up an important class of words in our language (unlike, say, prepositions, which hardly inspire awe). Linguists rank adjectives right up there with nouns, verbs, and adverbs as one of the four major word classes in English. Each of these classes plays a different lead role in the drama of a sentence: nouns are the actors, verbs are the actions, adverbs give the actions shape, and adjectives give us a clearer sense of the actors.

Adjectives, used discreetly, make descriptions come alive. Take Jonathan Raban’s “deep episcopal purple,” which describes the color of the sky as the sun sets over a barren landscape in his book Bad Land. What a fresh way to describe such a cliché subject!  “Episcopal” names an exact shade of purple (the color of a bishop’s cassock, or a priest’s vestments on particular holy days). It also subtly spins a thread between the sunset and a religious experience in the reader’s mind.

The most evocative adjectives leave room for the reader’s imagination, allowing different associations and interpretations, without departing from the writer’s overall idea.

The real danger in using an adjective—and really any word—is overusing it until it loses its oomph, until it cannot paint a picture of its subject (or even touch the brush to the canvas). Arthur Plotnik has written an entire book on tantalizing adjectives of praise precisely because of the ones that make his skin crawl: great, fabulous, and terrific, along with their cousins amazing, awesome, and unbelievable. Called Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives,  the book lists—starting with “all-bets-off best” and ending with “zhooshy”—the most mind-marmalizing, wit-sharpening, noodle-frying, brains-into-putty astonishing adjectives.

(Here’s a WBUR interview about the book.)

Of course, some situations call for more subtle superlatives. William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow next to the white chickens in his famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” gets at an image by appealing to the reader’s senses. Nothing actually happens in the poem; the point is to transport you to this scene. Without the simple adjectives conveying color, the poem wouldn’t be able to take you there.  

Then there are the “angelheaded hipsters” from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. He crafted an adjective from two nouns to describe denizens of San Francisco, “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

What adjectives have knocked your socks off? Add a comment. I will send a copy of Better Than Great as a reward for the most zhooshy example.

 {And thanks to poet Ava Sayaka Rosen, who lent her favorite examples to this post.}

Related posts:

1. Pompous Ass Words

But I’ve been stocking up stuff to share with you as soon as I get out of the Kim Chee. For a taste, I thought I’d turn you on to a Web site I found in my research, called Pompous Ass Words.

Dan Fejes started the site more than nine years ago, out of frustration with reporters who rely on words that made him pick up his dictionary one too many times. The straw that broke his back was “risible,” in a Maureen Dowd column. “When I saw that it was completely synonymous with ‘laughable,’”Fejes writes, “I started mentally shouting at the paper: “I WALKED AWAY FROM MY COFFEE FOR THIS?!?!”

Since when should the current story not be current, spoken to and for the common people? On his Web site, Fejes and others track high-falutin words they come across in news stories and have to look up in the dictionary—only to find that they have put down their reading for a word with absolutely no use except to befuddle them. In each case, the obscure word means little more than what another completely legitimate, common word means—down to its shade and shadow. Fejes calls these “pompous ass words,” or, as he otherwise puts it, “words everyone should know about and never use.”

This journalist gets it that reporters and columnists want to sound authoritative.  But at the same time, a smarter-than-you approach really doesn’t make sense. The message would be more urgent if it didn’t sound like a history book someone wrote with a feather pen in a dusty library.

“While I understand the complaints of those who think it’s anti-intellectual,” Fejes wrote me in e-mail, “I respectfully disagree. Choosing the right words for the right audience is important. There’s a time and a place for ornate language. You can be in favor of the simplest, most functional language in everyday use without it being a call for a descent into monosyllabic grunting or lolspeak. Sometimes the simplest, most functional language is pretty complex.”

Hear, hear—and thanks to my research assistant, Ava Sayaka Rosen, who has been helping me on the pompous ass words front.

Related posts:

1. Wit-sharpening words

Actually, the only things that keep me on a cardio machine are breaking news, baseball, or trash TV, but I love my iPod for long walks. (I’ve also been using it to escape from manuscript hell: I put on sweet slack-key guitar, play with colorful magic markers and easel-sized Post-Its, and draft my chapter outlines. Sort of like fingerpainting for grownups. Slapping a teal-colored outline up on the big white wall in my office is makes me forget how freaked out I am about my deadline.)

Allison continued her rhapsody, turning to the thrilling new life the iPad gives the written word. “Your world can be reshaped, redefined by what other people have accomplished, what they have fantasized, what they have dreamed about and made a reality,” she said. That was once the promise of traditional books; now it’s the promise of e-books.

I confess, I don’t yet have an iPad. (Nor an iPhone, although my husband and I share what we call the “WeTouch”—an iTouch for two.) I’m gonna buy an iPad with the second installment of my advance. (In addition to fingerpainting, promises like this keep me going.)

iPad or not, we all need to stay on top of the fast-and-furious changes in the book biz. Check out these three new essays in the Sin and Syntax Salon:

• In Heather Ross’s e-book update you’ll get answers to questions like “How big is the e-book market?” and “What should I expect in e-book royalties?”
• In another essay, literary agent Michael Larsen shares his thoughts on the Google Books Search court case.
• Finally, in a third salvo, Bill Petrocelli explains why he’s welcoming Google Books at his Bay Area bookstore.

BTW, the Google Books Search case (here’s a collection of New York Times updates) has nothing to do with Google e-books. Many authors like me “opted out” of the company’s $125 million class-action settlement with the Author’s Guild and a collection of publishers.” No way I wanted to cede my copyright to Google! In March 2011, a federal judge in New York agreed with us doubters, saying the deal went too far in granting Google rights to exploit books without permission from copyright owners. We’ll all have to stay tuned on developments in the Grand Google Scan. (Does that last word sound like scam?)

Of course, we all use Google Books to take a peek at pages. But there’s nothing like owning your own copy. Which do you prefer, bound books or digital? Kindle or Nook Cloud or iPad?

Related posts:

1. Sarah Baker with an E to Z on e-books
2. Bastard talk, with Dorothy Allison
3. Bookseller Bill Petrocelli on Google e-books

The highlight of the conference was a keynote by Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedwellers. The 62-year-old author is also a poet, an iconoclast, a mother of a “turkey-baster baby” and an inveterate watcher—with that baby, her now-18-year-old son Wolf—of American Idol. (Mind you, she only watches the first few weeks. She loses interest once the contestants get people to do their hair and makeup—“I want them in a raw, unfettered state,” she says, when they are “artists held in contempt.”)

Many other conference speakers told us how to write bestsellers (hah!), and build our brands (yuck!), and sound not a wit like a twit on Twitter (good luck—I mean, 140 characters is just 140 characters). But Allison dug in and talked about what it means, really, to be part of the tribe of People Held in Contempt (i.e., penniless writers in a society that measures success in dollar signs).

She also bucked up those of us freaked out by the tumult in publishing, whether the bankruptcy of Borders, the ubiquity of ebooks, or the building of the Huffington empire on the backs of unpaid bloggers. Allison doesn’t pooh-pooh digital storytelling, confessing that her latest iPod download features Sissy Space reading To Kill a Mockingbird. (“I’m in mad love with Sissy Space. My woman dies, I’m goin’ after Sissy. I’ll get her up in the night and make her read me other books.”)

Sissy Spacek or no, Allison still believes in books, deep in her Carolina soul: “They will say to you that publishing is dead,” she told us. But “after the Black Death comes the Renaissance. After everything changes, we go back to essentials. And this is what I believe is essential: We’re lonely. We’re scared. Some of us have insomnia. We get up in the night, and we walk back and forth. You can only watch television so long. PDX 90? Damned if I’m doin’ exercises in the night. Oprah? I already saw the show. No, no, no. I get up in the night, an’ I need a story. I need a book. I need somebody to invite me into a world they have imagined whole. Or stolen. I genuinely don’t care. Just take me there. Ride me on language. Charm me. Fascinate me. Scare me or excite me, but take me out of myself. We are lonely. We are scared. We need story. That does not change.”

Allison wrapped up by quoting Vladimir Nabokov: “I don’t write to change people. I don’t write to make a difference. I write to make that still, small sob in the spine.” Then Allison riffed on the quote: “That is not about money. That is not about prices. That is about that immediate, intimate connection.” She leaned into the microphone, her stringy gray hair sweeping the top of the podium. “Let the culture, let the economics, run behind me. I know what I’m doin’. I write to make that still, small sob in the spine.”

No related posts.

In the Preface to The Art of Fact, Yagoda defines this mysterious genre, which might also be called “literary journalism.” I emailed the University of Delaware English professor to see whether his essay is available online. Alas, it isn’t. So I thought I’d summarize it here, and encourage you to buy the book.

Above all, Yagoda argues, literary journalism must be factual. Memoir and essays are out. A work in this genre must involve a process of active fact-gathering, and it must have currency. (If the writer doesn’t get on the story soon after it happens, he says, “the resulting work edges into the realm of history.”) That’s the journalism part.

The literary part involves “thoughtful, artful, and valuable” innovation. The writer casts aside the more constraining conventions of journalism, moving, for example, from quotes gotten in interviews to dialogue gathered in careful observation.

The seminal works Yagoda lists include John Hersey’s Hiroshima (“the first serious work to attempt a novelistic factual narrative on a large scale”), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Piers Paul Read’s Alive, and Gary Smith’s “Shadow of a Nation.”

Defining the genre further, Yagoda writes subdivides literary journalism into three principal categories:

• Narrative journalism: A “fly-on-the-wall” reporter gathers information about an event and relies on the model of novels or scripts to tell the story. Think Ben Hecht, Jimmy Breslin, Bob Greene, Tracy Kidder.
• First-person reportage: The reporter plays a role in the forefront of the story, understanding that “outsized and unabashed subjectivity can be a superb route to understanding.” Think James Boswell, George Orwell, A. J. Liebling, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer.
• Style as substance: The writer crafts such a distinctive voice, structure, or even syntax that the work is elevated to the level of literature. Think James Agee, Joseph Mitchell, Joan Didion, John McPhee, David Simon, Svetlana Alexiyevich, Rysard Kapuscinski.

If you, like I, lament the absence of women in these lists, take heart. In addition to Joan Didion and Stalin’s daughter, Yagoda calls out Rebecca West and Lillian Ross as early practitioners of literary journalism. If you are eager to explore the non-Maileresque set, check my slightly more diverse lists of classics.

And, in case you missed it, here is my stab at defining narrative journalism.

Related posts:

1. Best of narrative journalism (articles)

The list of tricks varied slightly in Marci’s post and Anna’s article, and I’d be curious to hear which you find most useful. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share Anna’s questions, which probed whether email and texting are degrading the art of letters, and my answers, which have been slightly expanded from the original email exchange.

Anna Tims: Are writing skills getting generally poorer today, and does text short-hand/email informality partly account for any diminishing standards?

Connie Hale: It’s so hard to generalize! There are those who just text to their heart’s delight, not caring about quality, there are those who write for work who care but are untutored, and there are those who have spent years reading, studying, and working at writing. Then there are those who just have awesome talent. (I hate those genetic oddities.)

Some new studies show that many kids adept at texting are also “communicatively adept.” My fast-fingered nieces certainly get the difference between the vernacular of MySpace and more eloquent English. Aren’t we all capable of literary bilingualism? Think of how we adults express ourselves in jargon and out of jargon.

What has surely happened, though, with mass literacy and easier access to computers and cell phones, is that more and more people are writing and publishing on their own. So the mediocre middle has expanded exponentially, giving us a lot of ho-hum prose. At the same time, technology has placed a premium on the brief and the informal, which is a good thing. People who learned in school to write stiff, academic stuff are finding that email allows them to write more authentically, with natural verve and voice. I would bet that if you looked at really fine writing a century ago and fine writing today, you’d find that the amount and degree hasn’t changed that much. It’s hard to say writing skills are on the wane when we can find fiction by Cormac McCarthy and Lorrie Moore, pulp nonfiction by David Grann, TV shows by David Milch and David Simon, or Tweets by Susan Orlean.

AT: What are the most common errors in people’s writing today—bad spelling? limited vocabulary? inappropriate tone?

CH: The biggest failure of much business writing is a lack of imagination (all those clichés!). But you may be asking about more basic errors. Most people would benefit from simplifying sentences into a subject, a verb, and an object. Short, clear sentences trump overloaded ones jammed with information. I’m not sure if the mechanical mistakes are the same in the U.S. and the U.K., but the most common thing I see is the inability to distinguish between *it’s* and *its* and the use of *they* or *their* when a singular pronoun is required.

AT: Is fine writing, even in the form of a memo, appreciated in the world of work or are we all so slipshod that few of us notice? Why, in other words, is it worth learning good writing skills?

CH: In a story in The New York Times, page A-1, Adam Liptak writes about how the current U.S. Supreme Court is defining itself by long and flabby and opaque opinions. Lower-court judges are struggling to interpret these opinions. So, are writing skills noticed? I would say so.

Most people don’t write well—it’s hard work!—and when someone has the knack it is usually recognized. I have an aunt who writes outrageously funny Christmas letters, and friends and family all comment on them. On several occasions, and from different quarters, Facebook friends have told me they welcome posts that are well crafted and maybe even meaningful. People in all walks of life appreciate recognize writing that has depth and style.

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The digs were a cliché, the view anything but.

As is our habit, though, we soon lost sight of the view, our conversation zigging and zagging from California politics to home renovations to copy editors we have known. (This prompted by my attempt to explain my research on verbs.) Pete remembered a New York Times rewrite guy who sent clouds “porpoising” through the sky. I recalled an LA Times lede that described a crashing DC-10 as a “cartwheeling fireball,” and a San Francisco Examiner headline that announced the resumption of capital punishment in California by relying on one verb, in the much-maligned passive voice: “Executed.”

Traveling the mysterious byways of true conversation, we then riffed on the evils of PowerPoint, noting how a Microsoft sensibility has invaded the nation’s newsmagazines—or what’s left of them. More and more stories seem to be conceived in bullet points. That tool of boardroom presentations and professional-development seminars is pushing storytelling out of lectures. It’s turning raconteurs into recounters. We noted that even travel editors—who once expected odysseyan journeys—now want “chunklets” and “charticles.” Web editors want links and search-engine optimization.

This conversation comes in a week when I’ve been struggling with an assignment from a favorite editor. He wants an essay in which I tell 1500 years of California history in 1500 words. How tempting it is to write a “roundup,” that glossy newspaper version of the bulleted list. I’ve been told to write a “capsule history”; how can I find the “story” and leave capsules to the medicine chest?

From swells crashing into the Big Sur coast, I develop the metaphor of waves of people shaping California. I found a couple of irresistible characters, and do my best to animate the story through voice. We’ll see what my editor thinks of my attempt.

Writing—no matter the length, no matter the venue—should always be a struggle. It takes time to synthesize a lot of information and find a narrative arc, and more time to let every sentence tell a small piece of a big story.

I’ve just posted an essay on literary nonfiction that attempts to help us think beyond PowerPoint. The ideas come from the three years I spent teaching writing and running conferences at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

We all have a tendency to grab for the easy structure—or, returning to the images of last night’s dinner party, to accept the neat corners of uninspired architecture and the easy certitudes of black and white. But how we need to gaze out the window, to contemplate the mysteries of the city at night.

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Where did this meme start, and have the people who spread it really studied the history of English?

Let’s go back, way back, before the birth of Greenwich Mean Time…. The first people to arrive on the island we now call Britain were the Celts (also called the Britons). They were soon joined by Scots, Picts, and some Latin dudes who wandered over from the Roman Empire. Then, round about the fifth century, the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived from the continent, through what are now known as Holland, Germany, and Denmark.

These barbarous tribes brought with them the seax (a terrifying blade from which the Saxons got their name) and a language that had been mixing it up with Latin for centuries. As linguist David Crystal points out in The Stories of English, the vocabulary of English “has never been purely Anglo-Saxon, even in its Anglo-Saxon period”!

Anglo-Saxon did eventually form the basic stock of Old English, enlivened with a smattering of Celtic and Latin words. St. Augustine brought new ingredients from Rome, Danes added some sustenance of their own, and then the Normans spiced things up with French and more Latin. By the time of Shakespeare, English was a rich verbal stew—then the Bard added all kinds of coinages to the pot.

That didn’t stop early language mavens from craving a pure, purée-smooth English. In the sixteenth century, John Cheke suggested that words with Latin and Greek origins be replaced by words with Old English roots, and in the nineteenth, authors like Dickens and Hardy sang the virtues of an all-Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. In the twentieth century, George Orwell took up the banner, arguing in “Politics and the English Language” that “bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin and Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.” In other words, good writers don’t rely on words with Latin roots (or, for that matter, any non-Germanic roots).

Orwell’s point—and it’s a fine one—was that straightforward, punchy words should trump pompous, polysyllabic ones. Point taken. And it’s true that a lot of obtuse abstractions (ameliorate, disintermediation, subaqueous) have Latin roots. Second point taken. But here’s the thing: English has always borrowed nice, crisp, short, specific words from other languages. Of the following 24 words, can you tell which are Germanic in origin and which ones were snatched from Latin: belt, bin, cat, cook, craft, cup, day, dog, earth, god, gold, home, light, pan, pit, pot, red, sack, sock, stop, sun, wall, wife, work? See the answers here.)

And what’s the matter with early imports from Scandinavia (cake, crooked, dregs), France (bacon, ginger, proud), and Frisia, aka Holland before it was Holland (island)? (Props to David Crystal for most of my examples.)

Today 80 percent of our vocabulary comes from “foreign” sources, including these perfectly good if very un-Anglo-Saxon words: ballot (from Italian), banshee (Scots Gaelic), bungalow (Hindi), garage (French), gong (Javanese), goulash (Hungarian), junta (Spanish), kahuna (Hawaiian), kiosk (Turkish), llama (Quechua), marmalade (Portuguese), mentsh (Yiddish), robot (Czech), slim (Dutch), sofa (Arabic), tomato (Nahuatl), tycoon (Japanese), window (Old Icelandic), yen (as in desire, Chinese).

The next time someone tells you to “prefer the Anglo-Saxon,” offer to edit his or her copy with a well-sharpened seax.

No related posts.

I might be the only one so enthralled, though, to be writing a new book that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about verbs but were afraid to ask. That research is taking me deep into the library stacks, as I review the history of English, bone up on linguistics, and track down little-known texts. It’s also taking me deep into the narratives of some of my favorite writers, who know exactly when and how to deploy those little words to make sentences pulse.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Raban, describing the melancholy landscape of Eastern Montana, in Bad Land:

…In forty miles or so I hadn’t seen another vehicle. A warm westerly blew over the prairie, making waves, and when I wound down the window I heard it growl in the dry grass like surf. For gulls, there were killdeer plovers, crying out their name as they wheeled and skidded on the wind. Keel-dee-a! Keel-dee-a! The surface of the land was as busy as a rough sea—it broke in sandstone outcrops, low buttes, ragged bluffs, hollow combers of bleached clay, and was fissured with waterless creek beds, ash-white, littered with boulders. Brown cows nibbled at their shadows on the open range. In the bottomlands, where muddy rivers trickled through the cottonwoods, were fenced rectangles of irrigated green.

Many people wouldn’t think to use so many verbs in a scene description: they wouldn’t think to show us a wind making waves and growling like surf; they wouldn’t hear the killdeer plovers crying out their name and wheeling and skidding. They wouldn’t see brown cows nibbling at their shadows and muddy rivers trickling through cottonwoods. This is the kind of passage I’m craving!

Do you have a favorite piece of writing, in which a true stylist uses verbs to such exquisite effect? Post it below, in the comments section! Or, if you’re shy, email me (connie-at-sinandsyntax.com). Please cite it properly, with the name of the author, the title of the book (fiction or nonfiction), and the chapter or page number where you found it.

I’d like to offer a little incentive: if it’s really good, so good that I decide to use it in the book, not only will I give you credit for finding it, I will send you a copy of a cool volume that has came across my desk: The Glamour of Grammar, by Roy Peter Clark (New York: Little, Brown, 2010). Clark explains that in Scottish English the word grammar (which once meant mastery of all arts and letters) evolved into glamour (which referred to a mastery of magic and enchantment).

Send me passages with verbs that are all magic and enchantment, and I’ll send you The Glamour of Grammar!

Related posts:

1. Grammar sites and blogs that bite
2. Grammar, in doorstoppers & handbooks
3. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, on the other hand, called it “craftsmanship”: “What’s really important for a creator isn’t what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what’s important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It’s not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

Poet Robert Frost remarked that “style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.”

Are you dizzy yet?

I took a crack myself at defining style in an essay in the Sin and Syntax Salon: I suggest that literary stylists use wonderful words, smart syntax, literary devices, and maybe even structure to echo or underscore the idea of their story.

◊

But, mucking  around a bit more, I asked some of my favorite writers—including Po Bronson and Susan Orlean—how they define style, and whether they have favorite “stylists.” Here’s what they said:

Po Bronson:

I don’t have singular favorite stylists, I just keep a mental catalog of style tricks I’ve seen over the years, which are available to draw upon (if, theoretically, I could remember them at the right moment). But I do think about it. On my website I have this page where I have an example of a variety of fiction and nonfiction, implementing stronger styles of various sorts. One’s a story through FAQ style narrative. One’s nonfiction meant to read with the immersion of fiction. One’s about split alternative narrative futures. One’s an early short story in maximalist voice, my reaction to the popularity of minimalism in the early 90s.

Susan Orlean:

Style is so hard to describe… I guess I’d say it’s as ineffable and indescribable as someone’s personality, and in fact, I think a writer’s style is linked exactly to personality. It’s the voice of the storyteller, the distinct tone and tenor of how a writer “talks.” I think of it as a genuine and organic expression of the writer’s way of looking at the world.  My favorite stylist? Hmm. Non-fiction? Or fiction?

Tommy Tomlinson:

I usually think of style as something that strikes me AFTER I’ve read the story—if the story is really good, I’m a lot more concerned about what happens next than how the author is presenting it. When the style outshines the substance, I usually just put the book down. It’s a delicate trick, I think, to write in a style that sounds like a narrator (or a character) speaking, and not like the author speaking. I love a narrative voice that sounds more like somebody telling me a story than an author writing down words. When the style is right it’s intellectually absorbing AND emotionally rewarding.

Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated has a distinctive style—he talks directly to readers, guiding them through the story, peppering them with questions. Every time I read a new Gary piece, it’s a jolt to read that style, and I’m always thinking this is the time it won’t work. Then 100 words later I’ve forgotten all about it and I’m neck-deep in the story. This is one of my favorites. And here’s a story I did a few years ago as a Gary Smith homage.

Katy Butler:

The “literary style” I worship is compelling and transparent. If style is the window through which I see the story, I don’t want the window drawing attention to itself, covered with filigree or etching. I want to see the characters in the scene, and be absorbed in the writer’s thoughts. So I don’t like unnecessarily fancy words or over-clever thoughts. On the other hand, I work for hours on the opening of a piece to get it right. I don’t want any dirt or lumps on that window. I scan the sentences, as if they were poetry, because what trips the tongue will trip the eye, and beautiful rhythm will please and reassure the reader without her knowing it. You want the reader to know she’s in good hands. I omit unnecessary words and details. I trust my irrational mind or heart when it insists on including a detail whose significance I don’t understand.

In the opening of “My Father’s Broken Heart” [written for the New York Times Magazine], I HAD to include the mention of two cardinals in my mother’s birdbath, her Japanese iron teapot, the weak October sunlight in which we discuss turning off my aged father’s pacemaker.  I don’t want the reader to linger over those details, but I want them to subtly suggest the fidelity of a long marriage, my immigrant mother’s foreignness and interest in Zen, the weakening of the end of life.

So I like style that is pared-down, and yet beautiful. Metaphors and similes exist, but are sparely used. More is implied than stated. There’s rhythm, alliteration, choice of “kitchen table” Anglo-Saxon words rather than multisyllabic Latinate language.

On the other hand, I love Virginia Woolf, and her language is often complex.. But the language never overwhelms the images. I am carried on a stream.

Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” is another example of the style I like.

Good prose writers are secret poets. We use all of the craft skills of poetry: telling detail, synecdoche, repeating elements at the opening and the end, rhythm, scansion, etc. But we pretend we aren’t doing it.

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My colleague Audrey Dolar Tejada, a journalist and poet who experiments with nonlinear storytelling at www.strangetango.com, added these thoughts:

Literary style is ultimate self-expression and exploration. In an era in which books are largely marketed to leverage on multiple platforms, in digital forms, as movies and screenplays, and as brands, I eschew the temporal for the eternal. Stylists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges wrote novellas—a literary form now rarely published in which concept and form, not necessarily plot, are part of the intellectual and sensory enjoyment of literary works. Judged against today’s best sellers, Borges’ “The Library” and Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” are unmatched in their innovation, spare beauty, and ambition.

How do you define style? ? Add your comments, below. And if you’d like to play around a bit with style, there are some suggestions in Week Twelve section of Online Writing Classes.

Related posts:

1. Orlean, Bronson, Butler and others on style
2. When style suits substance to a T (or a tea)