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:
“It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)