Indeed, the hallmarks of the style which made him famous were precisely those qualities of accuracy, conciseness, and concreteness which were nurtured during this apprenticeship in journalism"." (Fishkin 140-141) .
It was not just an attention to detail and a talent for brevity that Hemingway learned from his time as a newspaper man, it was an entire theory of literature. "Hemingway believed that good writing springs from knowledge that the author should write about things which he really knows"." (Morgan 5) Hemingway would always insist on writing about what he knew and refused to exaggerate or speculate, choosing instead to write characters he understood who spoke about things he had experienced.
A word often used to describe aspects of Hemingway's prose or the central element of his style as a whole is 'simple', but this should not be taken as a criticism or a an indication of a limited vocabulary or lack of intelligence on Hemingway's part. This style is deeply premeditated and agonizingly edited, each work meticulously pared down from a larger draft the same way a sculptor might spend a year carefully removing pieces of marble to reveal a beautiful sculpture beneath. (Hemingway might have taken issue with this metaphor - he preferred to think of writing as a workman's craft: "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over". (Hemingway, Short 192) Kathleen Morgan tells it plainly: "Hemingway ruthlessly pares unnecessary words from his sentences.Hemingway avoids the lengthy simile.Hemingway's working vocabulary is colloquial and economical.Hemingway limits himself for the most part to words that are simple, colloquial, and familiar; this self-imposed limit in vocabulary is.a factor in the immediate recognition of the general Hemingway style noted above"". (Morgan 5) The key part of this observation is 'self-imposed'. .
Hemingway was intelligent, well-read and more than capable of crafting complex, detailed sentences if the need struck him, but almost without exception, he chose not to.
