The above two examples are what we would call written with [a] prophetic style, a style that classic style - despite a shared affinity for unqualified assertion - has little in common with. The ability of the prophetic writer to know truth has come through powers that are not part of the usual human complement.
Even their possessor does not possess them reliably: these powers come and go in ways that he does not understamd or control. In Western culture, the best-known examples of prophetic style are in the Old Testament.
It explains that men judge by appearances but the Lord judges by the heart. Some genius-crackpot writers claim to be channels for impersonal and normally inaccessible truth. The writers make claims to authority, but not their own authority and not the kind of authority that is available to others.
Many politicians, and an occasional jurist, often use prophetic style showing us those mysterious channels of wisdom or to speak the judgement of principles. Mostly prophetc writers run the risk of being lost in the fabulous vision in which they are embedded. Prophetic writers inexplicably find themselves in the realm of the divine, where they do not belong - an often sorry and monstruous parody of style.
From the perspective of classic style, prophetic or plain style is deficient because the theology behind these styles ignores the fact that, left to themselves, people are vulnerable to special interests and prone to special pleading.
People are weak, and common wisdom is thus often self-serving. It is perfectly possible for common wisdom to be an anthology of a community's complacent errors, because common wisdom does not include any principal of critical validation. Without critical testing, common wisdom becomes received opinion.
In the classic view, truth is the possession of individuals who have validated common wisdom; for them, truth has been achieved, and such achievement requiries both experience and a critical intelligence beyond the range of babes.
"It is necessary to express what is true in order to write naturally, powerfully, sensitively." J. La Bruyère In the classic view, truth comes with a structure that we already know and accept. Adopting a new truth does not mean adopting a new form. In classic style, a new truth will be expressed in old words structured in a reassuringly familiar form.
There are many different styles: plain, classic, romantic, contemplative, oratorical, sublime, prophetic, practical, diplomatic, et al. To recognize a style, one must recognize its fundamental stand on decisive questions, which will be reflected with greater or lesser skill in its level of expression.
Our objective here and hence will not consist in mastering and parroting certain surface patterns to fit in with our SEO - Search Engine Optimization model - but rather in training the mind. However, it is rather a gift than an acquired quality, we should still do our best to train our minds.
Writing is in itself an unnatural act. The spoken word is older than our species, as is the instinct for language. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome.
"Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendence to bake, brew, or write." - Charles Darwin
Speech and writing differ in their mechanics, of course, and that is one reason children must struggle with writing: it takes practice to reproduce the sounds of language. But they differ in another way, which makes the acquisition of writing a lifelong challenge even after the mechanics have been mastered.
Speaking and writing involve very different kinds of human relationship, and only the one associated with speech comes naturally to us. Spoken conversation is instinctive because social interaction is instinctive: we speak to those with whom we are on speaking terms.
We have nothing for free as we cast our bread upon the waters by sending a written missive out into the world. The recipients are invisible and inscrutable. At the time that we write, the reader exists only in our imagination. Writing is above all else an act of pretense.
The key to good style is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate. There are many possibilities.
We must write as if we have something important to say, or; write as if we have something truly important to show. And that is a key ingredient in the sense of style. Writing in classic style takes whatever form and whatever length the writer needs to present an interesting truth. The classic writer's brevity "comes from the elegance of his mind, never from pressures of time or employment".
"Truth is available to all who are willing to work to achieve it, albeit truth is certainly not commonly possessed by all and is no one's birthright."
Writing is an intellectual activity, not a bundle of skills. Writing proceeds from thinking. To achieve good prose styles, writers must work through intellectual issues, not merely acquire mechanical techniques.
Although it is true that an ordinary intellectual activity like writing must lead to skills, and that skills visibly mark the performance, the activity does not come from the skills, nor does it consist of using them. In this way, writing is like conversation - both are linguistic activities, and so require verbal skills, but neither can be mastered by learning verbal skills.
Neither conversation nor writing can be learned merely by acquiring verbal skills, and any attempt to teach writing by teaching writing skills detached from underlying conceptual issues is doomed. Intellectual activities generate skills, but skills do not generate intellectual activities. The relationship is not symmetric.
But it is possible to learn to write by learning a style of writing. We think conceptual stands are the basis of writing since they define styles. To be sure, it is only through the verbal level that the conceptual level can be observed, and verbal artifacts - like plumage - help identify a style.We might compare plain writing with classic style through a few simple examples:
"The early bird gets the worm." -Plain."The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." -Classic."The truth is pure and simple." -Plain."The truth is rarely pure, and never simple." -Classic.
Nevertheless, in general, a style cannot be defined, analyzed, or learned as a matter of verbal choices. A style is defined by its conceptual stand on truth, presentation, writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships. Classic style, for example, adopts a conceptual stand on three elements that can be expressed briefly.
Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive disinterested truth. Successful presentation concists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity.
The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language.
The eighteenth-century merchant Jean-Baptiste Le Brun expressed his mantra a follows:
"J'ai sur-tout à cæur la clarté.... Mon style ne sera point fleuri, mes expressions seront simples comme la vérité."
(Above all, I have clarity at heart. My style will not be at all florid; my expressions will be simple as the truth.)
Classic style overlaps with plain style. And both differ from self-conscious, relativistic, ironic, or postmodern styles, in which "the writer's chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naivité about his own enterprise.
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