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 public who squares his work to the slant of other writers.

“The best way to tell your story is to plunge right into it, and let the atmosphere take care of itself, which it is sure to do in good time. The closer you can write to the way you talk, the closer you will come to interesting the reader and attaining a good literary style.”

Charles Darwin once said to a young writer:

“Do not despair about your style. I never study style; all that I do is to try to get the subject as clear as I can in my own head, and express it in the commonest language which occurs to me. But I generally have to think a good deal before the simplest arrangement of words occurs to me. It is a golden rule always to use, if possible, a short old Saxon word. Such a sentence as ‘so purely dependent is the incipient plant on the specific morphological tendency’ does not sound to my ears like good mother English—it wants translating.”