A Matter of Style

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Matthew Clark, a specialist in classical studies, teaches in the
Division of Humanities at York University. In A Matter of Style, he
offers a brief but wide-ranging examination of prose techniques.
Wonderfully eclectic, his discussion ranges from the ancients to
contemporary authors, and includes copious examples drawn from scholarly
writing as well as fiction. His method is to scrutinize passages from
representative works, often breaking them down phrase by phrase as he
assesses their rhetorical strengths and weaknesses. The first chapter
covers “a few points on grammar,” while the next 10 move on to such
subjects as word order, rhythm, and sundry figures of speech, before
culminating in a bird’s-eye view of fictional form in “The
Morphology of the Novel.”

As a brief study of prose style that touches on those topics the author
finds most relevant, this book is an unqualified success, genuinely
instructive and consistently entertaining. Within its pages it offers
copious insights into common elements of prose technique, illustrating
with unusual clarity and wit many of the features of strong writing. The
variety of authors and works covered—from Aristotle to Jane
Austen—gives the book an engaging pan-historical flavor, while also
acknowledging the changes in literary taste that have dictated the rise
and fall of specific kinds of figurative language. Clark quite rightly
argues against the notion that a knowledge of technique is somehow
antithetical to literary creation, and his lessons, as he suggests,
could certainly be of use to many in the scholarly trade: “Students
are supposed to learn how to write from their teachers, but too many
academics today write as if they had no interest in making themselves
understood.”

One of the peripheral pleasures of this book is its gutsy (and
justified) criticism of a number of modern greats. Clark includes
examinations of passages from George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and
Northrop Frye, suggesting revisions where even these giants stumbled.