The Common Style of Common Sense

The extraordinary impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense has often been attributed to its style to the simplicity and forcefulness with which Paine expressed ideas that many others before him had expressed. Comparative analysis of Common Sense and other pre-Revolutionary pamphlets suggests that Common Sense was indeed stylistically unique; no other pamphleteer came close to matching Paine's combination of simplicity and forcefulness. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In Common Sense, Paine, an Englishman only recently arrived in America, launched frontal attacks on the institution of monarchy in general arid on the British crown in particular, and painted a bleak portrait of the oppressiveness and injustice of British colonial rule. Deriding the very idea of monarchy and ridiculing George III as "the royal brute of England," Paine sounded a clarion call for American