Diction? No – couldn’t be that because you aren’t talking about the spoken word, but the written word.

If you’ve read Hemingway, you’ll know his trademark style is the ‘bare bones’. It was quite a radical reversal of the traditional style at the time he was writing – the F. Scott Fitzgerald style of turgid descriptions and an avalanche of adjectives. FSF wasn’t alone – that’s the way people wrote in those days, so Hemingway seemed like a breath of fresh air, a crisp, new style of writing. However, it becomes very tiresome after a bit.

But I have no idea if that’s what you wanted to know or not.