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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

But I've always wondered: why should business writing be like Hemingway's writing? He wasn't writing for that audience. Seems like it would be better to find examples of good writing for a business audience and use those. Same thing for journalistic writing: that's not what Hemingway was doing. Maybe take all the Pulitzer winning journalism from a few decades and use that or something. But it just seems weird to pick one arbitrary literary writer for this kind of exercise.

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Won't speak to literary/journalistic writing, but business writing definitely has a problem of quantity over quality. The exercise of really dumbing down the language helps with making sure you're actually getting the point across instead of just talking in vague abstractions. It also helps for communicating with ESL colleagues. In that sense, "more like Hemingway" is probably going in the right direction.

I guess it's that I've always thought this is a misunderstanding of what Hemingway was doing. He wasn't trying to write simple language comprehensible to busy business people trying to get their jobs done. He was trying to write good literature as he saw it. Any alignment of the two things is accidental at best but often just a misapplication. He left things out in order for them to exist in the reader's own imaginative journey through the book; his spareness was a way of welcoming the reader into the story. That is not a good thing in business writing!

It’s a good question and one I don’t know how to answer absolutely.

The reason why I think it most generally applies to “business writing” is because this area is most likely to value efficiency over others.

I don’t think it’s meant to say business folk should write like Hemingway, but that Hemingway is the most popular writer in this style.

>>this area is most likely to value efficiency

Agreed. The general style values simple sentences which helps reading speed and comprehension, especially for audiences that don't share your native language. And it reduces fluff. Adverbs, for example, generally don't help make a point in business writing - data does.

See the example in that last sentence? I snuck a premise instead of stating it as a hypothesis or providing data to support it. At best that causes confusion for the reader and at worst it can mislead people that aren't carefully watching out for pitfalls like that.

What was the sneaky premise?

A premise is a hypothesis. We don't explicitly tag all our premises; it's up to the reader to decide if they agree with the premises.

Fair, it wasn't a great example.

>We don't explicitly tag all our premises

True but we should aim to tag more of them in business writing. It's helpful to clearly state them so 1. You as the writer are crystal clear on the assumptions you're making, and 2. if there's any disagreement on premises you can resolve it before you spend any time discussing which course of action to take.

But my quibble is that I don't think Hemingway valued efficiency. It would be much more efficient to write "There was a man in the hospital who had lost his reproductive organs and this resulted in a tragically failed romance" but that is not how he wrote the story, because it's bad literature. But if someone at work asked me to write them an email about it, that's what I would write, because it's much more efficient than a whole novel.

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