From Wikipedia: "The grand style (also referred to as 'high style') is a style of rhetoric, notable for its use of figurative language and for its ability to evoke emotion.... The style is highly ornamented with stylistic devices such as metaphors and similes, as well as the use of personification."

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop defines the low, middle, and high styles of prose writing:

The low style is "rooted in the sounds of speech." It is often found in the dialogue of street-talk and in first-person narrations wherein the narrator is uneducated.

The middle style is "the voice of lucid, literate expository prose. In place of low-style color and intensity, it offers the educated, self-aware, consciously masterful plain prose that, not incidentally, bases itself in the talk of the middle- and upper-middle classes."

While the middle style aims to present facts with succinctness and clarity, the high style cannot be bound by these confines: it seeks to evoke rather than clarify, to create rather than define. It is high style prose that may be called poetic, entailing sentences that are masteries in themselves independently of the narrative structure; whereas in middle style the writing is merely a means in making a story known, in high style the writing intends to elevate the story to the sublime level.

The major drawback of the middle style is that "a manner that declines ever to become unduly excited is a poor vehicle for conveying—rather than talking about—overwhelming passion."

Examples of high style are the works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walt Whitman, or Edgar Allen Poe.

Examples of middle style are the works of Jane Austen, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham, George Elliot, Anthony Trollope, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen King.

Examples of low style... "Low style is what you hear in the redneck voice of Huck Finn and in the nattering busybodies of Eudora Welty and the foulmouthed louts of Denis Johnson." Examples of low style are books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye.

No one of these styles is "better" than another: they all serve their own purpose.