The Secret of Style

What does it mean to write "with style"?

Is style a quality that writers can add or remove as they please? Is it, perhaps, a gift that only some writers happen to be blessed with? Can a style ever be good or bad, correct or incorrect? Is style a kind of spice that's added to a piece of writing--or is it instead an essential ingredient of the writing itself?

In What Is Style? we consider the often contrary ways in which writers have responded to these questions over the years.

For instance, to American author Katherine Anne Porter, style was an intensely personal affair, "an emanation from your own being."

Not so, said the 19th-century English essayist Matthew Arnold. "People think that I can teach them style," he wrote. "What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

What Is Style? introduces a new section at About Grammar & Composition called Rhetoric and Style, a topic that we'll be developing over the coming months. Please join the conversation.

Image: Katherine Anne Porter, 1890-1980