Ernest Hemingway's Pared-Down Writing Style: Selections from In Our Time Anonymous 11th Grade

Ernest Hemingway is a profound writer who not only won the Nobel Prize, but also inspired the American writers who came after him to embrace minimalistic forms of expression. Just as Hemingway began writing, other authors also picked up his style and many books had been published with the same type of diction and syntax. By using the iceberg principle--simple text with deeper meaning--, manipulating syntax, and incorporating real life experiences into his writing, Hemingway crafts the text to reveal purpose and meaning. Within the stories of In Our Time, his manipulations of suggestion and syntax take a variety of forms, all of which attest to the power of a literary method that seems simple--but is only deceptively simple in reality.

Hemingway uses short, concise sentences to express his meaning. He used the iceberg principle which is only getting a small amount of information when the real information is either unavailable or hidden. Only one-tenth of an iceberg’s mass shows outside while about nine-tenths of it is unseen, deep down in the water, thus the term "iceberg". Almost all of Hemingway's short stories in, In Our Time, use this principle; yet, the short story, “Indian Camp” displays it the most. This quote,...