: Read Hemingway. Then read Henry James. These are both considered great English writers, so presumably both have acceptable writing styles. I looked at the first paragraph of two of their most

@Chiappetta298

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Read Hemingway. Then read Henry James. These are both considered great English writers, so presumably both have acceptable writing styles. I looked at the first paragraph of two of their most famous stories, and extracted the first two sentences of each. Compare.

James:

The story had held us, round the fire,
sufficiently breathless, but except
the obvious remark that it was
gruesome, as, on Christmas eve in an
old house, a strange tale should
essentially be, I remember no comment
uttered till somebody happened to say
that it was the only case he had met
in which such a visitation had fallen
on a child.
The case, I may mention, was that of
an apparition in just such an old
house as had gathered us for the
occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful
kind, to a little boy sleeping in the
room with his mother and waking her up
in the terror of it; waking her not to
dissipate his dread and soothe him to
sleep again, but to encounter also,
herself, before she had succeeded in
doing so, the same sight that had
shaken him.

Hemingway:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him.

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