Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29372
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I am going to paste the first paragraph of "A Farewell To Arms". I'd like you to count how many times he used the word "and".

> In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Now, as you can see, Hemingway TOTALLY over-used "and" so his writing must be bad, right? "The" is the same thing. It is a connector. What you want to do is get a rhythm going, and if "the" is your drum beat that makes the rhythm work, use the heck out of it! What counts is not how many times a computer program calculates that you use word X or word Y, but HOW YOU MAKE YOUR READER FEEL!

Original score: 1