• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

2. Collect Samples of Good Writing. Begin collecting examples of good writing in a discipline of your choice from a professor of your choice. You might, for example, begin a collection of introductory and concluding paragraphs because these are critical sites in all writing and are especially useful in understanding the ways different disciplines frame and present information.

3. Experiment with the Five-Finger Exercise. The primary shift in thinking that the book promotes is from the general and global to the particular and local—to a focus on words and sentences and details, rather than on the large (general) picture. In order to introduce this re-orientation, we offer a writing activity taken from a famous fiction writer, Ernest Hemingway. He called it his “five-finger exercise,” probably by analogy with the exercises that piano players do in order to make certain ways of moving their fingers more automatic.

Read the passage below, wherein Hemingway (calling himself “Your Correspondent”) offers advice to a young writer (referred to as “Mice”) who has come to him for advice. Then start practicing Hemingway’s recommended exercise of tracing impressions back to the details that caused them.

Everything we have to say in the book relates in one way or another to Hemingway’s advice, which is relevant to writing of all kinds, not just fiction. To become more aware—which is key to becoming a better writer—we have to train ourselves to notice more: both our impressions of things and how these are formed. Becoming more aware of our own responses is step one. Step two is tracing these impressions back to the particular details of experience that caused them.

Mice: How can a writer train himself?

Your Correspondent: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping, remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down, making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had. That’s a five finger exercise.

Mice: All right. [….]

Your Correspondent: Listen now. When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling, you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theater and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis and motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people. (Ernest Hemingway, “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” Esquire: October 1935 rpt. in ByLine)

Start practicing by doing the exercise aloud with others. Write down the three details you think contributed most to your response to a particular setting, such as a classroom or other place on campus. Then share these with the class or in a small group. Next, use the exercise to produce a short piece of descriptive writing about some location of your choice or that the class might visit as a group. Take time to just observe the scene, register your responses to it and write down details. Then recast your writing into a descriptive paragraph. Keep revising your description until you have a rendering of your “data”—the details—that will cause your readers to think and feel about the scene as you do. Try to limit the number of evaluative adjectives you use— words like ugly, beautiful, depressing, and so on. Let the details do most of the work.

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Chapter 2

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Toolkit of Analytical Methods I: Seeing Better,