Organization theory has many excellent stylists, probably due to its much lamented plurality. This article quotes several exemplars of style-as-theory or perhaps style-as-method, to show that there is a vast repertoire to choose from and to expand. This article adds that this is a posteriori judgment: there are no ‘styles that persuade’, only ‘styles that have persuaded’ — some readers, at a certain place, at a certain time. This article focuses on native English writers, not because they are the only ones to develop a style, but because a rhetorical analysis performed in English on a text written in another language borders on absurdity, and the same analysis applied to a translation from another language raises a host of doubts as to whose style is under description. All analyses are language bound, but a rhetorical one even more so.