Ernest Hemingway stuck to these 4 rules to become a better writer in 1917. They still apply today.

Ernest Hemingway is widely considered one of the great American novelists. He won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 and 1954, respectively.

“His short, declarative sentences, intentional repetition, and general absence of adjectives were a departure from the style of every previous novelist,” notes teacher Jessica Leader via PBS, which premiered Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s six-hour documentary Hemingway in 2021. “Whereas authors before him conveyed meaning and mood through ornate descriptions of setting and detailed character sketches, Hemingway kept his writing terse and sparse.”

Hemingway honed his writing style during his short journalism career at The Kansas City Star, where he worked from October 1917 to April 1918. The paper’s style guide gave him rules and a framework for crafting his writing.

Hemingway’s 4 writing rules
The Kansas City Star‘s style guide, The Star Copy Style Sheet, mainly helped Hemingway report on straightforward stories about the police and emergency rooms.

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

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