I have been reading books on writing style. My teachers at Beechwood Park Preparatory School for Boys taught me to avoid writing in the first person whenever possible, so up with that opener one shall not put, though of course, nowadays only the Queen uses the Nob’s Pronoun. Begin again.

This reader has been reading books on writing style. But that is a tautology: all readers read, and all writing has style, good or bad. Worse, I have blundered into the bog of elegant variation. Henry Fowler, coining