Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
Published 2025 · 320 pages · 88,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Show Don't Tell to read?
Show Don't Tell scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Plain contemporary vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Clear, easy sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete social situations.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Moderate per story.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Reliable narrators who nonetheless miss things.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Restrained.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Steady social comedy.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- Stories end on small turns.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- A collection.
How Show Don't Tell is regarded
Show Don't Tell holds a literary regard score of 37 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.