Further to my previous blog post, about the wisdom of scrubbing out all the self-indulgent sentences in any piece of written work, I would just like to add that you can go too far.

Most writers will at some point have worked with an overzealous editor, or more often sub-editor, who feels the need to hammer down any turn of phrase that sticks up. Reading the resulting text can be unpleasantly like watching paint dry.

My former colleague Andrew Charlesworth captured this tendency perfectly: he called it “running over the text with a beige roller”.

I am a long-term fan of Car magazine which, despite a tendency to motor up its own backside from time to time, remains the only quality magazine on the topic. A topic I love.

I like a lot of Car’s regular writers, but especially enjoy the work of design critic, cultural commentator and employer of unusual sentences Stephen Bayley. I am transfixed by his writing in the same way I’m spellbound by the TV presentation style of Jonathan Meades. It works, but it shouldn’t. And anyone trying to emulate the style would look like a pompous buffoon.

Take these wonderful, oddly non-spherical pearls from Bayley’s critique of the new Opel GTC concept car - and specifically the Vauxhall baggage it would have to carry if sold in the UK (Vauxhall being roughly as sexy and sophisticated a marque as Damart):

“...branding is sorcery, poorly understood by even its adepts...”

“There are many people who can wave a MagicMarker to good effect, but today design is about transformations and, most importantly, our perception of them.”

“There were moments of boldness in the 1950s when corset-coloured Crestas offered cargo-cult Detroitismus to the road warriors of the Preston bypass era.”

And no, I don’t know what Detroitismus means either.

There’s another part of this article that leapt out at me as well, although for different reasons:

“In matters of style the poet and critic Robert Graves advised writers to ‘cross out all the bits you are most pleased with’ to get a satisfactory result.”

This is a tip more often attributed to lexicographer Samuel Johnson - “Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

But from whatever source it springs, this is advice I heard on my first week in journalism more than 14 years ago, and it remains the most worthwhile guidance I’ve yet come across for those in the business of writing. But it’s also the most exquisitely difficult rule to stick to. Bayley may quote it, but does he apply it? And do I?

Probably a no on both counts, happily and sadly.