Ernest Hemingway, an American writer, a Nobel Prize winner, and a member of the Lost Generation, was known for his brief, concise sentences and his excellent dialog writing skills. The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, has been regarded as one of his most iconic works. An investigation has been conducted to analyze Hemingway’s writing style in The Sun Also Rises statistically, and to hence confirm the public’s impression on Hemingway’s writing style. This report aims to document the two major findings of the investigation. It has been discovered that Hemingway’s preference of brief sentences exists, and that dialogs are frequently used in the novel.
Usage of Brief Sentences
Fig 1.Sentence length in The Sun Also Rises and their total frequencies from five randomly chosen samples
Fig 1 is a bar chart that records the sentence lengths in five samples taken from The Sun Also Rises. To investigate the pattern in the sentence lengths, five samples have been taken from the novel by random. Each sample consists of three pages. The lengths of each sentence in each sample are measured in terms of word count, and are organized into seven groups (e.g.≤5, 10~15, 25~30). The frequencies presented in the chart are the sum of the individual frequencies in each sample. It can be observed that sentences in the range of five to ten words are most common, and that the sentences with length of 25~30 words are least common. The pattern shown in the chart is that shorter sentences are more common than longer ones, with the exception of the two extremes. A sharp decrease in frequency from 5~10 and 10~15 is also noticeable.
The pattern discovered confirms the prevalence of brief sentences in Hemingway’s work. It is typical for a simple sentence to have five to ten words, and these simple sentences can be treated as “brief”. Sentences shorter than five words (inclusive) are less preferred, probably because these sentences are fundamentally incapable of carrying sufficient meaning, and the frequent usage of them could result in discomfort of the readers. The sharp decrease between class 5~10 and class 10~15 many indicate Hemingway’s deliberate control of sentence lengths – as an obsessive reviser, he might have intentionally condensed or segmented a certain proportion of sentences over 10 words.
Usage of Dialogs
Fig 2. Proportion of dialogs in The Sun Also Rises
Figure 2 is a collection of pie charts that record the proportion of dialogs in five sample chapters in The Sun Also Rises. The respective proportion is calculated via the formula
The charts show that the mean proportion of dialogs in The Sun Also Rises is around 40%. The maximum observed is in Chapter 6 (68%), while the minimum lies in Chapter 1 (only 16%). In the five chapters investigated, two of them have dialogs that exceeded 50% of the chapter’s content.
The results show that dialogs are an essential part of Hemingway’s writing style. An average of 40% has demonstrated the writer’s reliance on dialogs in developing the plot and depicting different characters. However, the dialog coverage, though significant in all chapters investigated, is not homogenous throughout the novel. In Chapter 1, the detailed introduction of Robert Cohn minimized the usage of dialogs. In Chapter6, the verbal conflict between Cohn and Frances maximized it. Hemingway presents background information to the readers with fewer dialogs, and utilizes dialogs in more intense situations to ensure the vivid reading experience.
Overall, the investigation has successfully proven the existence of two iconic features of Hemingway’s writing style. Brief sentences with around five to ten words are most typical in Hemingway’s work, and approximately 40% of a Hemingway novel is written in the form of dialogs. Enthusiasts who are willing to imitate Hemingway’s writing style can revise their sentences and the dialogs with reference to these data, and may be able to increase the resemblance by adjusting the proportion of brief sentences and dialogs.
