Caustic, acidic, venomous, and vitriolic are good adjectives to describe the tone Mencken usually employs in his published writings. Mencken is entirely unafraid of offending, scandalizing, or otherwise startling the reader with his inflammatory rhetoric and bombastic authority. Despite his sometimes flowery (and certainly always advanced and unusual) vocabulary, Mencken has a cut-to-the-chase, confrontational style, as if begging the reader to rise up and yell at the newspaper.