words themselves, forgive the stylistic infelicities; I did first
write on writing-tablets to be corrected diligently later, but I
wrote them directly on the parchment, exactly as it is, harshly
barked out.

Such a cavalier attitude towards the finished product was not
characteristic of Guibert,[36] and seems to be in keeping neither
with his declared penchant for difficulty, nor with his declared
intention to raise the level of his style to match the significance
of his subject:

No one should be surprised that I make use of style very much
different from that of the Commentaries on Genesis, or the other
little treatises; for it is proper and permissible to ornament a
history with the crafted elegance of words; however, the mysteries of
sacred eloquence should be treated not with poetic loquacity, but
with ecclesiastical plainness. Therefore I ask you to accept this
graciously, and to keep it as perpetual monument to your name.

The seriousness of purpose and the apparent looseness of structure
may perhaps be reconciled by considering that the literal level of
events was a less urgent concern for Guibert than the significance of
those events. In addition, he imagined himself not so much as a
recorder of events, but as a competitor in a rhetorical agon, as the
implied metaphor that he uses in describing his activity as writer,
in hujus stadio operis excurrisse debueram, "racing in a stadium,"
implies.

In fact, in the course of composing his explicitly corrective version
of the First Crusade, Guibert participates in several contests