Hemingway's Style and Journalistic Influences

Brevity in speech and in writing is a quality that was recognized by a supremely talented wordsmith and the preeminent practitioner of English writing, William Shakespeare. In Act II, Scene II of Hamlet, while delivering a report to the king and queen, Polonius delivers the following:.
             "This business is well ended. .
             My liege, and madam, to expostulate .
             What majesty should be, what duty is, .
             Why day is day, night night, and time is time, .
             Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. .
             Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, .
             And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, .
             I will be brief: your noble son is mad"." (Shakespeare 2.2.86-92) .
             If brevity, then, is the soul of wit (meaning here canny intelligence and perceptive thought), then Hemingway may well be the wittiest writer of the 20th century. Hemingway is frequently contrasted with the lurid and excessive prose of 19th century writers because his works marked a stark shift in the practice of modern writing. His writing has become such a prevailing influence in American writing that it is something a writer finds he or she has to be either consciously emulated or completely avoided. .
             Hemingway didn't develop this writing style entirely on his own, however - it was his time spent working for a newspaper and the formative experiences he had in World War I that produced the sparse, powerful style that left such an indelible impact on the world of literature. As explored in an essay by Zoe Trodd, Hemingway's propensity for brevity was developed out of a sense that war had 'used up his words'. This was reinforced when a snippet of a retyped Henry James quote was found among the pages of his unfinished manuscript of "A Farewell to Arms." On the snippet, Hemingway prefaced the James quote "The war has used up words " by writing "on the debasement of words by war"."(Bloom 209) However, Trodd notes that "Long before this, Hemingway's limited vocabulary, few adjectives, and concrete descriptions of specific objects all countered with minimalism the problem of "used up words.