An Article About Hemingway

Here's a link to a nice article about Ernest Hemingway's style:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/11/prose-rhythm-2-sentences-by-hemingway.html
The title of the article is "Prose Rhythm, 2 Sentences by Hemingway."  The author is Bill Benzon, writing in his New Savanna blog.  The article does a nice job examining two sentences from Hemingway's work, "Death in the Afternoon."

Here is a trick to reading the blog page:  Mr. Benzon used images to illustrate the sentences with one phrase per line in order to emphasize the phrases, but his images are too small to read.  The trick is to copy the images (right-click and copy) and then paste them into a Word document.  Then you can zoom the Word document so the images are legible.  I think it is worth the effort to read these two sentences in this fashion.

The first sentence is 131 words long and the second is 170 words long.  Francis Christensen presented studies of Hemingway's sentences in "Notes Toward a New Rhetoric, 6 Essays for Teachers."  Christensen promoted a style of sentence he called "generative:"  adding phrases to a base sentence to generate more details.  Sheridan Baker in his book, The Practical Stylist, calls this style of writing "loose."  Others call this style "generative."  See, e.g., Generative Rhetoric by Richard Nordquist.  Still others call this the "cumulative style:" How to Write Better Sentences: Christensen’s Cumulative Sentence by Daniel Wallace.

After Strunk and White pushed for concise sentences, there has been a counter movement emphasizing longer sentences.  Adios, Strunk and White by Gary and Glynis Hoffman is one such book, and Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon is another.

The best advice for students on writing good sentences is chapter 7, "Writing Good Sentences," in Sheridan Baker's book, The Practical Stylist.  You have some exposure to the Christensen style, but just enough to know it without being made to believe that it is the best way to style a sentence.

Hemingway is actually as famous for terse sentences as for long sentences:  Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well by Brian Clark says "use short sentences."

It is because Hemingway is famous for terse writing that his longer sentences get special attention.  If you have not yet read the two sentences high lighted in the article, "Prose Rhythm, 2 Sentences by Hemingway."  by Bill Benzon, you should do so now.

Robert