The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Written language is one of the visual arts. Visual devices that we call punctuation direct the reader when to pause, or stop. They alert you to what’s more important (and less). Quotation marks let you know someone is speaking, paragraphing that a new thought-cluster is occurring, and a line skipped after a paragraph that there’s a change coming in

Originality is the confluence of content and form—distinctive choices of subject plus a unique shaping of the telling.

a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.