The principles listed here are sound and helpful. If you follow them, your writing style will undoubtedly improve. But do not adhere to them as rigid rules or you will suffer in your ability to express yourself. Passive voice exists for a reason. Long words can add variety, rhythm, and color to your prose. Elongated sentences can help give your writing a flow that a mere parade of short sentences can never hope to ac…
Much truth here. Years ago I took a summer school course in technical and scientific writing involving intense exercises in ruthlessly eliminating passive voice (regardless of the gymnastics involved in doing so) and many other common tropes of academic writing. The course was like a cell-obliterating chemotherapy against whatever creative writing voice I had managed to put together at that age, and it took years to…
Hemingway: Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.
Faulkner: He did not feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which it its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.