Faulkner vs Hemmingway: A fight to the death?

Many times in my career as a writer, I’ve been told to “write like Hemmingway and not like Faulkner.” For those of you who may not be familiar with these authors, Hemmingway’s writing is characterized by his short, pithy, almost choppy sentences and directness. Faulkner, on the other hand, was not very fond of punctuation and so often fell victim to the run-on sentence. I’ve heard that he holds the world record for longest sentence, and if you’ve ever read his stream of consciousness works it’s easy to believe. When we learned about the difference between writing and reading levels, though, I began to think about this criticism. Who, out of Hemmingway and Faulkner, has the highest reading level? Highest writing level? So I decided to test this out for myself. I took a small passage from one of each author’s novels—Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—copied it into Microsoft Word, and tested for the reading ease, Flesch-Kinkaid writing level, and the percent of passive sentences. According to my tests, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury had a reading ease of 76.1, a writing level of 6.1, and 0% passive sentence, while Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea had a reading ease of 88.4, a writing level of 5.3, and 0% passive sentences. To be fair, a better “experiment” would involve taking more passages from several different texts and averaging the results, but I think these statistics are pretty telling. These two random passages yielded extremely similar figures. What I found most interesting, though, is the fact that these two authors are great figures in American Literature. No one would say that either Hemmingway or Faulkner couldn’t write, at least without getting flack from the academic community, but they are writing at a fifth grade level. This makes me re-evaluate just how much weight I put into reading and writing levels.