American Literature / Unit 15 AML 1418 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Hemingway's Sentence
Captions available
The idea
The Hemingway sentence is short, declarative, concrete and joined by and rather than by subordination, with few adjectives and almost no abstractions. It was imitated for fifty years, and parodied for longer, and it changed the default sound of American prose.
In practice
Short, concrete, joined by and.
Where people slip
The plainness is engineered, not artless.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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