<span class="headline">I</span>n 1915, the sinking of the Lusitania received exceptional play in <I><b>The Star</b></I>. A two-column headline announced the tragedy, the first of many in the next few years. The European powers plunged deeper into war, drawing the United States inexorably toward the trenches, which already snaked across the fields of eastern France.</p><p> Yet the war, in its first years, seemed distant in Kansas City. The Star supplied readers twice a day with details of the expanding conflict, but, on the whole, it still emphasized local news. Reporters, as they would for the next 60 years, bent over their typewriters, which then were attached to oaken tables in the cavernous city room. The staff rotated as <i><b>The Star</b></i> finished its run and the night staff of ``The Morning Kansas City Star,'' The Times, came to work. Almost to a man, the reporters wore caps and hats. Celluloid collars pinched their necks.</p><p> But change was in the air. And into the midst of The Star staff, in late 1917, came a youth who, when he could get away with it, wore a red and black checkered hunting shirt to work. Old timers frowned on such dress.</p><p> But the young reporter worked outside the office most of the time. His name was Ernest Hemingway.</p><p> Years later scholars would come to Kansas City to investigate Hemingway's tenure at The Star, which lasted from October 1917 to April 1918. This period fascinated Hemingway students because his lean, spare writing style, basically ``Star Style,'' led him to become one of the most acclaimed writers of the 20th century, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature and a legend as a man, warrior, womanizer and drinker.</p><p> The scholars would ask for the library's clippings on Hemingway and C.G. ``Pete'' Wellington, the assistant city editor of The Star in 1917. Hemingway credited Wellington with changing his verbose high school writing style into clear, provocative English. The scholars also requested ``The Star Copy Style'' sheet, a single, galley-sized page, which contained the 110 rules governing Star prose. Hemingway later would recall the sheet as something ``they gave you to study when you went to work and after that you were just as responsible for having learned it as after you've had the articles of war read to you.''</p><p></p><p>Hemingway would always remember the style sheet and its core admonition: ``Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.''</p><p> ``Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,'' Hemingway said in 1940. ``I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.''</p><p></p><p>The ``Copy Style'' sheet was a bible, containing eminently practical rules. Some others:</p><p></p><p><ul><li>Never use old slang. Such words as stunt, cut out, got his goat, come across, sit up and take notice, put one over, have no use after their use has become common. Slang to be enjoyable must be fresh. <li>Eliminate every superfluous word as Funeral services will be at 2 o'clock Tuesday, not The funeral services will be held at the hour of 2 o'clock Tuesday. Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc. <li>Don't say, He had his leg cut off in an accident. He wouldn't have had it done for anything. <li>He was eager to go, not anxious to go. You are anxious about a friend who is ill. <li>He died of heart disease, not heart failure -- everybody dies of heart failure.''</ul>