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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet
addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of
logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies
of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer,
or the artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on
the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot
must be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be
precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate the
argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The
genius of prose rejects the CHEVILLE no less emphatically
than the laws of verse; and the CHEVILLE, I should perhaps
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