Something that we noticed while reading Hemingway was his absence of interesting description. The words that were used the most were very basic description words. Typically when I think of people writing, they use very obscure description words and I just assume they plugged all the boring words people typically use into the thesaurus; not Hemingway though. He uses words such as good, know, looked, asked, thought. We found this interesting, but not all that surprising because a lot of the stories that we actually did read we found his stories to be somewhat boringly over-descriptive.
As we continued to peruse the works of Hemingway we happened to notice that Hemingway’s average sentence length in his works of fiction were relatively short when compared to other authors. His fictional average sentence length was 10.5 words per sentence while his non-fiction works were longer; they were closer to 20 words per sentence. Also if you do a quick Google search, you can see that other authors from the late 19th to early 20th century frequently wrote longer sentence in their works of fiction. For example in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was nearly twice as long as that of Hemingway’s works at 20.54 words per sentence. It seems that Hemingway preferred to be more concise in his descriptions as Tara found. It seems that he used very basic description words which could influence the lengths of his sentences.
As to why his non-fiction works were longer is that they were mostly composed of memoirs or journal-like if you would. In a story, it’s a little easier to imply context whether explicitly or implicitly. However, when you are writing about circumstances in your life you tend to be more descriptive as the events happen directly to you. Also, it generally requires more context to describe life events.
Another thing that we noticed was how words that revolve around drinking seem to correlate with the usage of words with different genders. When you look at the graph you can see that it appears to correlate the strongest with the words “boy” and “girl”, rather than with the words man and women. Yet, if you examine it further you come to see that drinking seems more connected to the word “woman” than the word “man”. But if you look at it on a more individual basis, drinking is linked most to the word “boy” than the word “girl.”
One could conclude that this shows that perhaps Hemingway connects drinking the most with younger men or “boys” than women and girls in general. Looking at Hemingway’s works of fiction, there are a lot of stories and passages that include characters engaging in conversations while drinking. It would seem that Hemingway portrays boys and women drinking more than girls and men.
It’s interesting to see this pattern show up using Voyant. When it comes to drinking, most people associate it with grown men rather than young boys. Also, if you consider the time period that Hemingway’s works were written in, this pattern seems out of place with the portrayal of how alcohol was acceptable to consume. It was a time where men would go and drink and smoke together after meals while the women went and had tea. It’s just interesting to see the connection in a place where it wasn’t expected to be.
Although the topics that Hemingway addresses in his fiction writing are deep and nuanced the prose he uses is simple. He trusts his readers to read between the lines of his texts and understand the emotions of his characters and even to discern large parts of the plot lines on their own. The simplicity of the language is shown in the vocabulary density of his writings. Hemingway’s fiction published during his life have a vocabulary density of .046 and his posthumous fiction works have a vocabulary density of only .028. Vocabulary density measures the number of unique words compared to the total amount of words used. Hemingway does not use a lot of descriptive or emotion words to set up the plot and emotion of his stories, rather, he uses common words that denote movement, conversation, and time. Because of the lack of emotion words, adjectives, and plot explanation, the vocabulary density is lower than many other writings.
Hemingway uses few emotion words to describe the feelings of his characters. Throughout the over 700,000 words used in all of Hemingway’s living fiction, no emotion words (out of the seven we looked at: embarrassed, suffer, shame, hate, joy, happy, sad, angry) are used more than 40 times. The two most-used emotion words are happy and sad, again, the most non-extravagant emotion words available.
