In a discourse on the elements of good writing, Ernest Gowers (1980), cites, as a chapter note, the following lines by Defoe: If any man were to ask me what I would suppose to be a perfect style of language, I would answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots and lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all, and in the same sense which the speaker intended to be understood.