22 Clarity, simplicity S ome writers feel that either you have a distinctive style or you don't. However, Robert Louis Stevenson believed that style is something you can learn, at least up to a point: Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the stu- dent who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end--these, which taken