Style Lesson 9: Elegance
Balanced sentence structure is the most important feature of elegant prose because it makes you sentenced balanced. Use words such as “and, or, nor, but, and yet”, to balance phrases and clauses. Second, elegant sentences end on strength, which can be created by ending with a strong word, ending with a prepositional phrase, ending with an echoing salience, ending with a chiasmus. Next, sentences should vary in length, but if they are longer than thirty words or so or shorter than fifteen, edit. While striving for elegance, understand that failure is common and keep persevering despite any initial difficulties.
Ultimately, to acquire an elegant style you must read writers who write elegantly, and then look at your own writing and understand the distinction between elegance and inflaion. Nonetheless, revise for simplicity of characters as subjects and actions as verbs, the complexity of balanced syntax, meaning, sound, and rhythm, and emphasis of artfully stressed endings.