This may be specific to online writing communities, but Hemingway is held up as a paragon of extremely simple, short sentences.
The only thing that’s simple about his writing is his diction (word choice). He rejects words like 'bountiful, excellent, resplendent" etc and opts instead for ‘good, bad, big, small’ etc. That’s good and new writers can learn big lots of things from that.
However, his use of sentence structure and various rhetorical devices is what gives his prose complexity. Many of his sentences are MARATHONS that can go on for half a page.
Outside of the genuinely simply-written ‘Old Man and the Sea’, open up a random page of his and you’ll find sentences like this entirely made-up example:
“The sun was high and the day was hot and so he drank a great deal of grappa which was good and wet and cool and the women came up sighing from the riverbed with their ankles showing and Robert waved to them and greeted them and then all of them made love with him for eighteen hours in the hot sun and the cool wet grappa replenished them and it was good.”
Now, this sentence is technically what’s called a ‘simple compound’ in that the many phrases are linked in a straightforward way by an onslaught of 'and’s. (Technically a ‘complex’ sentence has parentheticals and dependent clauses which Hemingway seems to think are disingenuous.) Mainly, Hemingway’s sentences are longer than they are complex. To modern readers though, long sentences like the above have a strong feel of being complex.
When the writing advice-givers are talking about Hemingway being such a simple writer who wrote clean, short sentences – they don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t read him. They have a false idea of him in their head, based on what other people have said about him.
If you’ve heard of the Hemingway app, his own books get an abysmal failing grade. Every sentence is highlighted red.
Also, the idea that ‘everyone should write like Hemingway’ (which is based on a lie) is bullshit advice anyway!
These chuckleputzes think that the Great Gatsby would have been improved if the opening line was: “Jay Gatsby was a wealthy man with a big house and he threw a lot of parties and he loved Daisy who was beautiful.” Like, fucking come on!
Is he? Plato’s Republic suggested odd battle tactics, and telling lies to discourage the aristocracy from keeping money.
But he also started a kind of proto-Feminism.
What little I remember of Aristotle was madness from start to finish, but then I didn’t read much of him.
To be fair Schrödinger is known primarily by physicists for his equations. But yeah it’s pretty annoying that most people don’t get he was trying to say how absurd it was with the cat thing, he was being sarcastic.
My first thought was Einstein, since people get basically everything he wrote wrong, even many physicists do. Then after getting what he wrote wrong, they get all giddy about “Einstein was right!” Or “Einstein was wrong!” When the thing they are “proving” wasn’t even what he said.
Stalin
This may be specific to online writing communities, but Hemingway is held up as a paragon of extremely simple, short sentences.
The only thing that’s simple about his writing is his diction (word choice). He rejects words like 'bountiful, excellent, resplendent" etc and opts instead for ‘good, bad, big, small’ etc. That’s good and new writers can learn big lots of things from that.
However, his use of sentence structure and various rhetorical devices is what gives his prose complexity. Many of his sentences are MARATHONS that can go on for half a page.
Outside of the genuinely simply-written ‘Old Man and the Sea’, open up a random page of his and you’ll find sentences like this entirely made-up example:
“The sun was high and the day was hot and so he drank a great deal of grappa which was good and wet and cool and the women came up sighing from the riverbed with their ankles showing and Robert waved to them and greeted them and then all of them made love with him for eighteen hours in the hot sun and the cool wet grappa replenished them and it was good.”
Now, this sentence is technically what’s called a ‘simple compound’ in that the many phrases are linked in a straightforward way by an onslaught of 'and’s. (Technically a ‘complex’ sentence has parentheticals and dependent clauses which Hemingway seems to think are disingenuous.) Mainly, Hemingway’s sentences are longer than they are complex. To modern readers though, long sentences like the above have a strong feel of being complex.
When the writing advice-givers are talking about Hemingway being such a simple writer who wrote clean, short sentences – they don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t read him. They have a false idea of him in their head, based on what other people have said about him.
If you’ve heard of the Hemingway app, his own books get an abysmal failing grade. Every sentence is highlighted red.
Also, the idea that ‘everyone should write like Hemingway’ (which is based on a lie) is bullshit advice anyway!
These chuckleputzes think that the Great Gatsby would have been improved if the opening line was: “Jay Gatsby was a wealthy man with a big house and he threw a lot of parties and he loved Daisy who was beautiful.” Like, fucking come on!
Your example reads like John Sandford to me. Halfway through it I started hearing it in Richard Ferrone’s voice
Aristotle might be taken aback by the fact that everyone knows he was wrong about everything, but some people still study him.
he gets credit for being less wrong than Plato though.
Is he? Plato’s Republic suggested odd battle tactics, and telling lies to discourage the aristocracy from keeping money. But he also started a kind of proto-Feminism.
What little I remember of Aristotle was madness from start to finish, but then I didn’t read much of him.
Plato thought that all apples got their essence from an eternal platonic magic Apple. I’d say he was pretty wrong on that.
Bukowski being quoted by posers on social media is making him spin in his grave like a fuggin’ beyblade
Lovecraft would probably be quite dismayed by people starting to reject his work because they learn how big of a racist he was.
Gawd? The editors of her books have really trashed them.
Nietzsche is a good candidate, but I think Schrödinger would be most upset about being known primarily for the cat thing.
To be fair Schrödinger is known primarily by physicists for his equations. But yeah it’s pretty annoying that most people don’t get he was trying to say how absurd it was with the cat thing, he was being sarcastic.
My first thought was Einstein, since people get basically everything he wrote wrong, even many physicists do. Then after getting what he wrote wrong, they get all giddy about “Einstein was right!” Or “Einstein was wrong!” When the thing they are “proving” wasn’t even what he said.
I can’t believe that the weird religious people sending me chain emails would lie to me about what Einstein said/did with his atheist professor.
was my first thought as well
removed by mod
get banned fashie
Orwell might be a bit upset about how his work is often used by the right, when he was expressly “against totalitarianism and for social democracy”
but Orwell just sucks in general
Why?