'They Were Just, and Clear'

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.” I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases me or somehow stylistically offends me. In either case, how does the writer achieve his effect? What can I learn from the successful sample? What would I change in the failed passage, if anything, that might improve it? Like many reader-writers, I’m an editor of other people's words. John Ruskin tells us in his eccentric and beautifully written autobiography Praeterita (1885) that when he was a boy his father required him to pack four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s periodical essays in his baggage whenever the family traveled. Instead of complaining, Ruskin approves of the paternal stricture. He writes of Johnson: “I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of…