Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills
Published 1977 · 208 pages · 58,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular to read?
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular scores 29 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 52 out of 100
- Deliberately accessible, written for working writers as much as critics.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Abstract principles always grounded in concrete textual examples.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Compact chapters with precise prescriptive and analytical content.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Hills occasionally builds to his point through extended example.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Mostly literal and analytical in register.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Dry editorial wit surfaces occasionally in evaluative passages.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Firmly stated conclusions throughout.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Clear instructional structure moving from general to specific craft concerns.
How Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular is regarded
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular holds a literary regard score of 71 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.