Style
Both the novel and the short story are written in an epistolary style, collecting together Charlie's personal "progress reports" from a few days before the operation until his final regression. Initially, the reports are full of spelling errors and awkwardly constructed sentences. Following the operation, however, the first signs of Charlie's increased intelligence are his improved accuracy in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and his word choice. Charlie's regression is conveyed by the loss of these skills.
Read more about this topic: Flowers For Algernon
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We think it is the richest prose style we know of.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)