• Swift's style is of the plain and simple kind; free form all affection, and all superfluity; perspicuous, manly and pure. 
  • He deplores the impurity, instability, and impermanence of English and aspires to arrest its obsolescence and purge it of corrupt words.
  • He prescribes standardization in spelling and punctuation.
  • He insists on simplicity and stylistic propriety, which he polices in his satiric invective against offending authors.
  • His arrangements are often loose and negligent.
  • In musical, elegant and figurative language, he is much inferior to Mr. Addison.
  • His manner of writing carries in it the character of one who rests altogether upon his sense, and aims at no more than giving his meaning in a clear and concise manner.
  • The disposition of circumstances in a sentence, such as serve to limit or to quality some assertion, or to denote time and place, there is a matter of nicety and it ought to be always held a rule, not to crowd such circumstances together, but rather to intermix them with more capital words, in such different parts of the sentence as can admit them naturally.
  • Swift's advocacy of a plain style in his didactic and satiric writings reflects a dominant cultural attitude to language and literary style.
  • Swift's exhortations can be paralleled in works from the mid -seventeenth century onward recommending a simple, straightforward plain style.