Montaigne Versus Austen

               "What goes on inside is just to fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant."- David Foster Wallace. This is a great observation of what goes on with a writer and their works. Two examples that come to mind would be Michael de Montaigne in his novel Essays of Michael de Montaigne and Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Both authors use specific styles that combined with their writing topics illustrate this concept.

When comparing these authors I find their styles are night and day, complete opposites of one another. First off their writing genres are quite different. Beginning with the Essays of Michael de Montaigne which discusses numerous opinions of Montaigne and his observations on life. Whereas Austen's Pride and Prejudice is a classic romance novel based soley on fiction rather than reality.

Another huge distinction between the two writers are their sentence style. Austen uses characters and dialogue to establish a central theme and develop her stories. She writes indirectly, in a 3rd person tense. Unlike Austen, Montaigne takes a more direct approach and writes in the first person, often using words like "I" or "Me" or "Myself".

Lastly the writers prefer using different sentence structures. Since Montaigne is writing about his own opinions and ideas, his thoughts are very scattered. It's as if he writes about one subject and then another object of opinion pops into his head and he decides to write on that subject half way through explaining his ideals on the previous one. Montaigne poorly organizes his thoughts, in fact theres not much structure at all in his writing. He's trying so hard to get all of his ideas out, that he sometimes neglects to fully complete others, "what goes on inside is just too fast.. for words". The Essays are very ill uniformed, often times his steam of consciousness is severed while writing.

 Austen however is very clinical in her work. She writes very well structured pieces which all tie into the universal theme she is aiming to teach her audience. Each thought flows precisely after the one before in a sequential rythm. The part I enjoy most about reading her work is the way she paces the novel. She strings out just the right parts adding and adding to the suspense and then tells other parts quickly to keep us from boredom.

Overall each author has their own signature style of writing, as they should have. Montaigne persuades the readers into believing certain ideas, while Austen uses descriptive writing to paint you pictures with her words, both equally good writing styles.