Compression and Expansion

You will be encouraged throughout the course to be aware of these two bedrocks of style. We will use Fiske’s Dictionary of Concise Writing as a guide to trimming verbal fat. Several of the schemes (for example, asyndeton and ellipsis) promote compression--lean prose. Think Hemingway and William Carlos Williams and Chekhov. (Or if you’re a Classicist, think Seneca.) As William Zinsser writes, “Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.”
On the other hand, you should also be sensitive to the beauties of Rubenesque style. The essays in Epstein provide many examples of rhetorical amplitude. Despite Fiske and the Plain Stylists, who would wish to banish Wordsworth or Joyce or Shakespeare or Cicero from the Kingdom of Rhetoric? (By the way, you might notice the use of polysyndeton in that last sentence—a scheme that is used to expand.)