Style & Narration
Style as a Tool
The most you ever get out of text books is "prose style must be clear." With regards to style, nearly all composition rhetoric's explain style in terms of clarity, as though "being clear" is the most important virtue in composition.
This is a fallacy, a hobgoblin of days better recollected, and a unwanted stigma for the modern study of style.
Style, like every other part of a text, contributes to one condition; the effect it has on the reader. Edgar Allan Poe understood this idea of effect well, as used it to his advantage. His most popular work, The Raven, remains in the memory of everyone who hears it, in large part due to the alliteration and assonance that propels the poem, as well as the haunting refrain at the end of each stanza.
