Tuesday, August 01, 2006

down with disjointed babble

That style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, Learning to Write 204 (1888; repr. 1920)

No comments: