The Sheila Variations

Sheila, do you have an opinion on Dante? I love his stuff. belle stilo.

Steve

Interesting article. Most of the books I find at the bookstore on personal style are like get-back-to-nature, find-the-wild-man/woman-within cheese-capades. I'll check out the ones they have listed in the article.

While I think there is usefulness in picking up one of these books, a lot of it seems to be self-indulgent, look-at-me-I'm-an-artist type stuff.

I've found a couple books on style/grammar that are rock solid.

William's _Style:Toward Clarity and Grace_ is good.
Kolln's _Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects_

I have a personal bias, I suppose, toward "Plain English For Lawyers." ;-)

My favorite book on prose style is J. Mitchell Morse's "Matters of Style," unfortunately long out of print. I used it frequently when teaching Eng. Comp. at the local community college. The reason I like it so much is that most books on style fall into one of two categories: the "how to be terse and clear" books and the "find your own personal voice and express your inner self" books, neither of which I find useful. By contrast, Morse presents excerpts from masters of prose style throughout literary history, analyzes how their prose works, and gives exercises in which the student is to imitate the styles of the various authors.

That's a great way to do it, Bryan. Take pieces from actual literary works. For some reason I remember my first college English class, where all the examples were on social policy, dams, rivers, and other not-so-interesting things.