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The Philosophy of Style

by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

“The Philosophy of Style,” explored a growing trend of formalist approaches to writing. Highly focused on the proper placement and ordering of the parts of an English sentence, [Spencer] created a guide for effective composition. Spencer’s aim was to free prose writing from as much “friction and inertia” as possible, so that the reader would not be slowed by strenuous deliberations concerning the proper context and meaning of a sentence. (Summary from Wikipedia.)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia – Herbert Spencer
• LibriVox’s Philosophy of Style Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (42 MB)
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Total running time: 1:26:55
Read by Gary Gilberd

mp3 and ogg files

• 1-1 Causes of Force in Language Which Depend Upon Economy of the Mental Energies Sec. 1 – 00:35:49
  [mp3@64kbps - 17.1MB]
  [mp3@128kbps - 34.3MB]
  [ogg vorbis - 20.0MB]
• 1-2 Causes of Force in Language Which Depend Upon the Economy of the Mental Energies Sec. 2 – 00:34:04
  [mp3@64kbps - 16.3MB]
  [mp3@128kbps - 32.7MB]
  [ogg vorbis - 19.5MB]
• 2 Causes of Force in Language Which Depends Upon Economy of the Mental Sensibilities – 00:17:02
  [mp3@64kbps - 8.1MB]
  [mp3@128kbps - 16.3MB]
  [ogg vorbis - 9.7MB]

Cataloged on April 28, 2007