How Hemingway learned to write like Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote for the Kansas City Star from October 1917 to April 1918, and there he learned the elements of his style.

As Star columnist Jim Fisher has written, Hemingway's style grew from:

``The Star Copy Style'' sheet, a single, galley-sized page, which contained 110 rules governing Star prose. Hemingway later would recall the sheet as something ``they gave you to study when you went to work and after that you were just as responsible for having learned it as after you've had the articles of war read to you.''

Hemingway would always remember the style sheet and its core admonition: ``Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.''

``Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,'' Hemingway said in 1940. ``I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.''

The ``Copy Style'' sheet was a bible, containing eminently practical rules. Some others:

• Never use old slang. Such words as stunt, cut out, got his goat, come across, sit up and take notice, put one over, have no use after their use has become common. Slang to be enjoyable must be fresh.
• Eliminate every superfluous word as Funeral services will be at 2 o'clock Tuesday, not The funeral services will be held at the hour of 2 o'clock Tuesday. Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc.
• Don't say, He had his leg cut off in an accident. He wouldn't have had it done for anything.
• He was eager to go, not anxious to go. You are anxious about a friend who is ill.
• He died of heart disease, not heart failure -- everybody dies of heart failure.''

The news in the news

Headlines on The Drudge Report:

WASHINGTON POST STAFFER: DRUDGE SHOULD SET HIMSELF ON FIRE...

Profanity-laced emails reveal POST reporter rooting for Dems...

BREAKING: Resigns...

An Unhappy Day At The Washington Post...

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic:

"How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?" one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. "I'm not suggesting that many people on the paper don't lean left, but there's leaning left, and then there's behaving like an idiot."

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. 

And Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

The Washington Post has a very, very long history of hiring young writers from proudly liberal opinion magazines (as do many other mainstream media outlets). I stopped keeping count, but I’m sure at this very moment there at least a half dozen alumni of the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, or The American Prospect charged with writing ostensibly straight news or analysis for the paper. They might not have left the same paper (or listserv) trail, but does anyone doubt that Ezra Klein says similar stuff when he’s off-duty all the time?

I don’t know if Weigel needed to resign or not. The revelation of his comments certainly might hurt his ability to get conservative activists to talk to him. But the fact that he talks this way among his fellow liberal journalist friends shouldn’t be cause for him to lose his job at the Post. Because he’s hardly alone. Weigel’s real sin was getting caught.

Hugh Macleod: something special and powerful

"If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed."

-- Hugh Macleod

A beautiful word

gossamer / gah-sê-mê(r) / noun

1. The material of the small threads spun by baby spiders, as they hatch in late summer, that carry them through the air to their new lives.  
2. Anything extremely sheer, filmy or flimsy; possessed of lightness and softness approaching nothingness.

Gossamer retains its association with threads, Dr. Goodword tells us. "She brushed a bit of gossamer from her face with a gesture so gentle and graceful as to not damage it." It refers to lightness and sheerness at the very edge of visibility. As Cole Porter put it in his 1935 song, Just One of those Things: "[It was] Just one of those fabulous flights; A trip to the moon on gossamer wings; Just one of those things." We can assume that sprites and fairies are equipped with gossamer wings.

History: Gossamer is a smoothed version of Middle English gos(e)somer "goose-summer," a shortening of goose-summer thread. Goose-summer apparently referred to Indian summer, the hot part of fall, when gossamer threads tend to drift about. The goose month (German Gänsemonat) is November, the time when geese are at their fattest and best for eating. There is a semantic connection with German Sommerfäden, Dutch zomerdraden, and Swedish sommartråd "summer thread".

You don't want to be this way

sesquipedalianism \ses-kwi-PEED-l-iz-uhm\, adjective:

1. Given to using long words.
2. (Of a word) containing many syllables.

It is very true that when the experiment of dictating is first tried, the luxury of the ease it gives is apt to be so great, that it tends to looseness and verbosity of style; for there is no better check on sesquipedalianism than the necessity of writing down one's sesquipedalian words for one's self.
-- Christian Examiner, Volume 72

History: 1615, from L. sesquipedalia verba "words a foot-and-a-half long," in Horace's "Ars Poetica" (97), nicely illustrating the thing he is criticizing, from sesqui- "half as much again" (see sesquicentennial) + pes "foot"

-- Dictionary.com

They're coming for your newspaper

I wrote a few days ago about a proposal in the Federal Trade Commission to tax some parts of the new media and use the money to prop up the failing old media. The power to tax and fund is always accompanied by the power to control. One wonders how this jibes with the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of the press ...

Dick Morris, the columnist and commentator, weighs in:

Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of Obama’s Federal Trade Commission, is at the epicenter of a quiet movement to subsidize news organizations, a first step toward government control of the media. We reported that he had commissioned a study to examine plans for a federal subsidy for news organizations. Among the measures under consideration are special tax treatment, exemption from antitrust laws and changes in copyright laws.

Now Leibowitz has begun to pounce. A May 24 working paper on “reinventing” the media proposes that the government impose fees on websites such as the Drudge Report that link to news websites or that it tax consumer electronics such as iPads, laptops and Kindles. Funds raised by these levies would be redistributed to traditional media outlets.

While Leibowitz distanced himself from the proposals for the taxes, calling them “a terrible idea,” his comments appear to be related only to the levies proposed in the working paper. Nobody is commenting on the other part of his proposal — a subsidy for news organizations. 

Indeed, Leibowitz sounds reasonable about things, and I can find no smoking gun in his public comments. However, it is his agency that produced this proposal, and he can't escape responsibility.

Here's something interesting about Leibowitz: he''s married to Ruth Marcus, who joined The Washington Post in 1984 and is currently on the editorial board. She has said:

"I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama."

And Obama made her husband chair of FTC. It's oh so cozy.

Image: your FTC chairman full of himself

Encouraging someone to talk

"If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it."

-- Joyce Carol Oates

All the news the government deems fit

The audacity of the Obama Administration know no bounds. It is now giving serious thought to propping up the dying main stream media.

Of course it is propping up the dying U.S. auto industry, a sop to the unions, but the auto industry doesn't have its own constitutional amendment. Can anyone name one thing the government has funded and not told what to do?

Dispatches from the frontlines of this latest squirmish in Obama's war to "fundamentally change" this country:

• The FTC's "Reinventing Journalism" project is only at the staff discussion level for now, but there is clearly an effort supported by President Obama to mount some kind of bailout for the newspaper industry similar to those previously conducted by the administration in taking over GM and Chrysler, as well as multiple Wall Street firms, most of the mortgage industry and key elements of the insurance industry.

• Centerpiece of the agency's recently released "discussion draft" is a proposal for a new 3 percent federal tax on monthly cell phone bills to create a $3.5 billion fund to be doled out by Washington bureaucrats to favored old media outlets like the New York Times.

• More devastating news today from Rasmussen Reports for the FTC's "Reinventing Journalism" project, as fully 85 percent of the respondents to a national telephone survey say protecting freedom of the press is more important than saving existing newspapers. Perhaps even more worrisome for the FTC is the fact that only 19 percent of the respondents think it's appropriate for the government to be involved in efforts to prop up existing newspapers, according to Rasmussen.

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) leaders are attempting to distance themselves from controversial proposals published in a May 24 working paper on "reinventing" the media. The report presents a suite of options through which government could step in and supposedly rescue journalism, most notably by imposing taxes. A fee could be levied on websites such as the Drudge Report that link to the best news of the day, or a tax could be imposed on consumer electronics such as iPads, laptops and Kindles. Funds collected would be redistributed to traditional media outlets.

Just some staff foolishness? Here's how Washington works:

Trial balloons are a fact of life inside the Beltway. When the administration and Congress want to enact a politically controversial policy, they often punt the issue to an independent federal agency whose leadership need not face the wrath of voters. Inside the agency, potentially unpopular ideas are presented first by staff so commissioners can jettison plans that prove untenable.

Passing the buck is a classic bureaucratic dodge. The FTC claims that the well-developed proposals released last month were simply an enumeration of options suggested in "public comments." In fact, the agency's Federal Register announcement for the proceeding questioned the propriety of news-aggregator websites that "do not pay for content" - this document was filed long before public hearings were held.

Now if you doubt that Obama has the media in his pocket, I'm not going to change your mind. But here are a couple of pre-election items.

August 20, 2008: A comprehensive analysis of every evening news report by the NBC, ABC and CBS television networks on Barack Obama since he came to national prominence concludes coverage of the Illinois senator has "bordered on giddy celebration of a political 'rock star' rather than objective newsgathering."

April 18, 2008: John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, founders of Politico, in an article entitled, "Obama's secret weapon: The media":

Harris: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and The Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama’s political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucu.

VandeHei: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama's speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he's on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing.

Maybe Obama will let us turn in our used copies of The New York Times under a new cash for clunkers program. I'm fairly certain that will happen, so why don't we all start dropping off our copies at the White House gate?

Desy Safan-Gerard: we are not communicating

"Many of us achieve only the semblance of communication with others; what we say is often not contingent on what the other has just said, and neither of us is aware that we are not communicating."

 -- Desy Safan-Gerard

Use short words

“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.” 

-- Winston Churchill

A style guide at The Economist has this to say:

Use them. They are often Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin in origin. They are easy to spell and easy to understand. Thus prefer about to approximately, after to following, let to permit, but to however, use to utilise, make to manufacture, plant to facility, take part to participate, set up to establish, enough to sufficient, show to demonstrate and so on. Underdeveloped countries are often better described as poor. Substantive often means real or big.

You really don't want to be this:

sesquipedalianism \ses-kwi-PEED-l-iz-uhm\, adjective:

1. Given to using long words.
2. (Of a word) containing many syllables.

It is very true that when the experiment of dictating is first tried, the luxury of the ease it gives is apt to be so great, that it tends to looseness and verbosity of style; for there is no better check on sesquipedalianism than the necessity of writing down one's sesquipedalian words for one's self.

-- Christian Examiner, Volume 72

History: 1615, from L. sesquipedalia verba "words a foot-and-a-half long," in Horace's "Ars Poetica" (97), nicely illustrating the thing he is criticizing, from sesqui- "half as much again" (see sesquicentennial) + pes "foot"

-- Dictionary.com

Perpend this

perpend / per-PEND

verb:
1. To ponder; deliberate.
2. To be attentive; reflect.
noun:
1. A large stone passing through the entire thickness of a wall.

While perpend as a noun means "a large stone passing through the entire thickness of a wall" (related to perpendicular), the verb form not only possesses a different pronunciation but also emerges independently from the Latin root perpendere, "to weigh carefully."

Perpend stone or bond stone is a building term used by stonemasons. Usually walls were built with two layers of stone, an inner and an outer layer, with the space between them sometimes filled with rubble. A perpend stone was a longer stone which went right through the wall, from outside to inside, and served to lock the two layers together. It's called a "tie stone" in the illustration.

Are books just for women?

Laura Miller, a senior writer at Salon.com, which she co-founded in 1995:

"One of publishing's truisms -- men don't read books -- has become self-fulfilling. Few men work in book publishing, so there are few supporters in the industry for books that men in particular might like, causing fewer such books to be published or promoted and finally leading men to think that books are not for them.

"It's worth asking, then, why there are so few men in publishing. Could it be the low pay, low status and ridiculous hours? (Remember that book editors seldom get to read manuscripts in the office -- that's what weekends are for.) Apart from a handful of celebrated figures, it's the rare editor who gets paid more than a secondary school teacher in a middle-class district. The profession has come to look a lot like a skilled, pink-collar ghetto, albeit garnished with a thin dusting of reflected glamor.

"Book editing, by contrast, increasingly resembles those "caring professions," nursing and teaching, where the joy of laboring selflessly on behalf of a noble cause -- in this case, literature -- is supposed to make up for the lack of profits and respect. And we all know who does that kind of job, don't we?"

When you want someone to listen to you

Speaking before a group, one of our worst fears, becomes less threatening when you realize that your audience cares a lot less about you than you think. Behind the faces out there are a lot of thoughts: the grocery list, the anxiety over a funny look from the boss that morning, the kid's grade in algebra, and the like.

If you feel better, don't: the same thing makes it harder for you to get your ideas in their heads.

Nick Morgan, president of a communications consulting firm, has two simple rules. 1. Know thy audience. 2. Tell them one thing, and one thing only.

Presentations are about their audiences, not their speakers. Before you write anything down, or commit anything to a Power Point slide, you must give some thought to your listeners. So ask yourself obvious — but easy to forget — questions like, what time of day am I speaking? How many people will be in the audience? Will they just have eaten, or will they be looking forward to a meal? Will they have heard a number of other speeches, or is mine the only one? The answer to each of these questions should affect the length, style and content of your presentation.

People have more energy and more ability to hear complex ideas early in the day; later in the day their energy flags and they don't want to entertain as many new ideas. Larger audiences demand more energy from the speaker and want to laugh more than they want to cry. The worst audience (from the speaker's point of view) is a tired, fed, slightly inebriated audience.

At one stage in my career, I delivered a number of after-dinner talks to audiences of advertisers in the publication where I was an editor. The host, our publisher, and I had an agreement: I would speak after the salad course. That allowed me to enjoy my dinner -- my primary motivation -- but it also meant the crowd wasn't as sleepy as it would be after a full meal.

Here's a way to remember this rule. Imagine that you speak only English and your audience speaks only Mandarin. How effective are you going to be? Now imagine what other barriers exist between you and them. Your business jargon, your point of view (you think environmentalists are nut jobs, and this is the monthly meeting of the local chapter of Greenpeace).

In my case, I represented The Reader's Digest, and my audiences were young, hip wear black and take your dog to work Madison Avenue types. If it Reader's Digest had any meaning to them, it was the thing that sat on the back of the commode at Grandma's house. So I turned that to my advantage, making fun of the magazine, which I could, given my standing there, and gradually bringing them around, I hoped, to an appreciation of it. Using their point of view, their language, their interests.

You can remember the second rule this way. Imagine a conversation with someone in which he or she is telling you far more than you can absorb. TMI. An electrician came the other day to fix a circuit that was out, and he was explaining what he was doing, and it was a tangle of neutral this, and breaker that, and I was lost. Don't do that to your audience, Morgan says.

The oral genre is highly inefficient. We audience members simply don't remember much of what we hear. We're easily sidetracked, confused, and tricked. We get distracted by everything from the color of the presenter's tie to the person sitting in the next row to our own internal monologues.

Keep it simple, stupid. TMI bad. KISS good.

You be the editor: "accountability" journalism

James Taranto, who writes the Best of The Web Today blog for The Wall Street Journal, points out the coverage of two presidents by The Associated Press. If you were the editor at The AP, what would you do?

Remember "accountability journalism"? As we noted in 2007, this was an Associated Press innovation designed "to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make." It started in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, and was exemplified by stories like these:

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

WASHINGTON (AP)--The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people's expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America's class and racial divides. It's a huge opportunity that neither party seems poised to exploit.

Nearly five years later, we have a different president, facing a new crisis in the Gulf of Mexico after having promised in 2008 that his winning his party's nomination would be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." And how is the AP reporting whether he's keeping that promise? Here's a Saturday dispatch from the wire service's Ben Feller:

President Barack Obama keeps reassuring the nation that stopping the Gulf oil spill and limiting the fallout on the region are his top priority.

Yet so is protecting the country against attack. And getting people back to work.

Presidencies usually don't allow for a dominant priority--just a list of priorities. . . .

Like presidents before him, Obama is having to work through unforeseen problems: offshore drilling and an environmental disaster, mine safety, the earthquake in Haiti, piracy off the Somali coast. . . .

Obama's ability to calmly handle many competing issues simultaneously is viewed as one of his strengths.

He has tried to let everyone know that what's unfolding in the Gulf is more than a momentary crisis. The spill, he said Friday from Grand Isle, La., is nothing less than "an assault on our shores, on our people, on the regional economy, and on communities like this one."

The president is also fond of saying he will not rest until the problem at hand gets fixed. The trouble is that there's always more trouble.

I don't recall this kind of writing when I was working for The AP way back when. Then again, I have trouble remembering yesterday.

Taranto's point, of course, is that The AP has a political viewpoint. I think it does, which historically the wire service was not supposed to have, since it provided news to all manner of publications.

What bothers me more is that the last piece on Obama says nothing at all. "It's just words," as my editor at AP Newsfeatures once said of a less than stellar piece I turned in. It's just drivel.

OK, you're the editor. What do you think?

Lose the message, save the medium

palimpsest / PAL-imp-sest / noun

1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased

2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface

"Canada, like any country, is a palimpsest, an overlay of classes and generations." (Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review, March 10, 1985)

In olden days, writing surfaces were so rare that they were often used more than once. "Palimpsest" originally described an early form of recycling in which an old document was erased to make room for a new one when parchment ran short. Fortunately for modern scholars, the erasing process wasn't completely effective, so the original could often be distinguished under the newer writing. De republica, by Roman statesman and orator Cicero, is one of many documents thus recovered from a palimpsest. Nowadays, the word "palimpsest" can refer not only to such a document but to anything that has multiple layers.

 A Georgian palimpsest of the 5th/6th century.

Architects imply palimpsest as a ghost—an image of what once was. In the built environment, this occurs more than we might think. Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or remodeled, shadows remain. Tarred rooflines remain on the sides of a building long after the neighboring structure has been demolished; removed stairs leave a mark where the painted wall surface stopped. Dust lines remain from a relocated appliance. Ancient ruins speak volumes of their former wholeness. Palimpsests can inform us, archaeologically, of the realities of the built past.

Example of an architectural palimpsest in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada

I like to think of the word in the context of writing -- the layers of meaning just beneath the surface of the words on the paper. And in the context of people, who are what we see but much more beneath.

On becoming a novelist today

John Irving is the author of twelve books, including “The World According to Garp,” “A Prayer For Owen Meany,” and most recently, “Last Night on Twisted River.” Over his career he has won a National Book Award, an Academy Award for his adaptation of “The Cider House Rules,” and many other honors, and has been translated into over thirty languages.

Here are his thoughts on young novelists today.

If I were twenty-seven and trying to publish my first novel today, I might be tempted to shoot myself. But I'm sixty-seven and I have an audience so I'm not especially worried about my future in the book business. But I think it's much harder to be a young writer, a writer starting out today than it was when I started out, when my first novel, Setting Free The Bears, was published back in the late sixties.

Here was a novel that wasn't even set in this country, it was about a couple of Austrian students and it had a historical section which was easily half the length of the novel about the Nazi and then Soviet occupation of Vienna, not a very American subject. I remember years later asking the guy who published that first novel if he would publish that novel if it came across his desk today, this was back in the nineties, and my old friend and editor and publisher, what I saw was, he hesitated too long. You know? He waited.

He thought, "Oh, God, how do I answer this one?" And then he said, "Well, of course I would publish it today."

And I said, "No, you wouldn't. I saw the hesitation." And he laughed and said, "No, of course, I wouldn't."

Very telling. And I think it's a lot tougher to be a first [time] novelist, to be an unknown novelist today than it was for me and so I worry about what's going to happen with those good, younger writers.

The fluff in newspaper articles

Do you still read newspapers?

If you don't, it may be because there is too much verbal noise in the writing.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses this in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Things have changed since I was committing daily journalism at The Associated Press, but I recognize in what he says the artificial tone of newspaper writing.

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.”

You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one. 

There are a couple of explanations. One is that everything in a newspaper is old in Internet time: you've already seen it online or on TV, and so the paper thinks it needs to wrap the facts in "meaning." Another reason is that these highly-paid, well-educated national reporters feel that they are above mere fact-typers. They're smart enough to tell us how to think.

I suspect we've trained ourselves to tune this stuff out, as we tune out annoying ads.