Speaking to a reporter from The Kansas City Star in 1940, Ernest Hemingway said, "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. 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."
Those rules--110 of them on a single sheet of paper--served as the Star's style guide when Hemingway came to work there as a cub reporter in 1917. (For a sample of his early nonfiction, see "Camping Out.")
"On the Star," he said many years later, "you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. That is useful to anyone."
For the complete article, see Ernest Hemingway's Star Style: The Best Rules for the Business of Writing.
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