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sharks with as much might and many weapons as he can summon, but only to find a giant skeleton of his marlin left after his desperate defense. At last, Santiago, having lost what he fought for, reaches the shore and struggles to his shack. He falls into sound sleep, dreaming of Africa, and the lions again. His struggle wins him much respect. Among many great American writers, Hemingway is famous for his objective and terse prose style. As the last novel Hemingway published in his life, The Old Man and the Sea typically reflects his unique writing style. This paper aims to discuss the writing style and techniques in The Old Man and the Sea. Of course, Hemingway has used many techniques in this novel, such as realism, the creation of suspense, monologue, etc. And this paper focuses especially on the language style and one of the important techniques-the way to use facts in this novel. Hemingway is famous for his language. With much care and effort, he created a very influential and immediately recognizable style. “The style he created in his early work, such as In Our Time and The Sun also Rises, was almost too good. Like the style of certain painters, it tended to become a manner, rather than a flexible way of responding to experience and conveying fresh insights through words.”1 Among all his works, The Old Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique language style. Its language is simple and natural, and has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingway always manages to choose words “`concrete, specific, more commonly found, more Anglo-Saxon, casual and conversational.” 2 He seldom uses adjectives and abstract nouns, and avoids complicated syntax. Hemingway’s strength lies in his short sentences and very specific details. His short sentences are powerfully loaded with the tension, which he sees in life. Where he does not use a simple and short sentence, he connects the various parts of the sentence in a straightforward and sequential way, often linked by “and”. In his task of creating real people, Hemingway uses dialogue as an effective device. It is presented in a form “as close to the dramatic as possible, with a minimum of explanatory comment.”3 Here is an example chosen from The Old Man and the Sea: ‘What do you have to eat?’ the boy asked. ‘No, I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?’ ‘No, I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.’ Here we can see that such interpolations as “he said” have frequently been omitted and the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative. But it is good to note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate and artificial, and is never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in order to stand out by contrast and to describe an important turning point or climax, the style is made a little different: He took all his pain and what was left of his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over on to his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.5 The language in this one-sentence paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham h