“When a new writer defends his “style,” the teacher smiles (or cringes) because real style isn’t an artifice. Real style – voice – arrives on its own, as an extension of a writer’s character.”

The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.

When style is done self-consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation, and as transparent as any affectation – an English accent on an old college chum from New Jersey, for example.