Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principals of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style. If you write, you must believe–in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.

-William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White in The Elements of Style