Second Thoughts

Maybe all simple writing isn’t good writing. In keeping with the post above, I decided to test a section from the King of Simple Writing, Ernest Hemingway. (The New York Times said Hemingway’s prose was “lean, hard” and “athletic.”) Here’s the first paragraph of The Sun Also Rises:

Robert Cohn was once a middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of this class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

Here are the scores:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  68.9

Percentage of passive sentences: 15%

Grade-level: 7.8

So, apart from having a few too many passive constructions, Ernest met all of my criteria for simple – and therefore “good” – writing. However, I found this book to be the most pointless book I’ve ever read. (I did finish it, though, which was better treatment than All the Pretty Horses received. See post above.) But, the guy won the Nobel Prize, for Pete’s sake. Once again, what do I know? I should be shot for even standing in judgment against the guy.

I just know what I like.