7 ms·
A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
- kolapuriya 10y agoTesting this by using it to write a blog post. So far so good. It's pretty nifty for "pruning" dense writing.
- jwally 10y agoReminds me of this: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243
- huac 10y agohttp://draftin.com http://draftin.com has something like this as well
- titzer 10y agoMost writing needs pruning. Not mine. Thanks. :P
- multinglets 10y agoI feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
- jsmith0295 10y agoI feel like every 4 or 5 comments, someone comments as if they have some new insight ;) Seriously though, this is a pretty useful tool, especially for people who are new at writing.
- multinglets 10y agoI have seen almost this exact same thing like a decade ago.
- daveguy 10y ago> I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight. Every 4 or 5 years everyone celebrates terse writing like it's new. FTFY.
- ksenzee 10y agoWriters periodically resurrect brevity.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoConcise is better than brief.
- BunnyRubenstein 10y agoWrite right.
- ksenzee 10y agoThere are trends in writing like in everything else, I guess.
- dragonwriter 10y agoNo, people celebrate terse writing fairly non-stop. It may only intersect with your awareness every 4-5 years, but its not like it goes away in between.
- kazinator 10y agoThose writers who don't appreciate terse writing are too busy writing to celebrate.
- copperx 10y agoWhen you become older, everything fits this pattern, which makes day to day living tiresome.
- rcthompson 10y agoI don't think this is presenting terse writing as a new insight. The innovation here is (if I'm understanding it correctly) using a grammar parser to identify some fairly complex criteria (e.g. avoiding left-branching sentences).
- Zolomon 10y agoIs there no beauty in painting vivid pictures through colourful expression? Sure, being terse makes consumption faster and easier, but don't you trade that for the tool of directing the reader's imagination? I guess the skill is in being terse yet still descriptive?
- combatentropy 10y agoThe examples in this tool can be misleading, especially if you haven't read the classics like _The Elements of Style_ and _On Writing Well_. Ridding your writing of fluff is central to their teaching, but not at the expense of detail. "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." --- William Strunk Jr., _The Elements of Style_ Instead of quoting them at length, I will let you read them when you have time. The Elements of Style is less than 100 pages, and most of On Writing Well is tied up in the first four chapters.
- conistonwater 10y agoThis reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
- donutz 10y agoYou sure that's not passive? Exhausted: drained, used up. By what? Sounds passive to me.
- korethr 10y agoYour question, by what, shows why it's not passive. In this case, "exhausted" is an adjective, and thus the sentence is not passive voice. The subject (I) is not receiving the action of getting used up or drained, it is doing the action of being in a drained, used up state. Now, if the sentence was something else like "I was exhausted by his tiresome ramblings," then yes, that would be passive voice.
- mwsherman 10y agoPassive voice is merely a form of speech. It’s not blanket-wrong. It serves to diminish the actor, which can be a legitimate choice. “He was diagnosed with flu” is passive voice, and appropriate, because the diagnoser is not important. We care more about the flu than the doctor. “Mistakes were made” is evasive and serves to obscure, and should be avoided.
- conistonwater 10y agoIt could also be the case that "mistakes were made" is poor, but without it having anything to do with it being in passive voice. Passive voice also doesn't necessarily "diminish the actor", consider "She was diagnosed by the doctors at X, and the diagnosis was later overturned by a senior doctor.". That's a kind of a blanket claim about passive that's just bound to be wrong when you check it on actual English sentences (I think Pullum's paper I linked to in another comment addresses this well).
- jccc 10y ago"Four score and seven years ago..." http://i.imgur.com/K0Mhkse.png http://i.imgur.com/K0Mhkse.png [I'm not snarking, by the way. Just playing with it. It's perfectly okay to have a tool optimized for, say, business correspondence.]
- kerkeslager 10y agoIn theory this is a great idea, but not a single implementation I've seen fits my needs. I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that. More crippling than that, these editors don't support anything besides the writing simplification features. HTML breaks it, markdown breaks it, and it can't do WYSIWYG (Hemingway does this last, but not well). I don't mean to criticize the tools too harshly: linguistic processing of any kind is hard and they do a good job at that. I can certainly see how this would be useful for someone who writes more seriously than I do and can take the time to write first and mark up or format in a different editor later. And the effort to make it something I would use is large. I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown, and a vim plugin. :) But for me, not having integration with my workflow makes it too complicated to use and the value it provides isn't large enough for me to change my workflow. [1] http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
- transpy 10y ago> I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown I was going to recommend Grammarly, it has a Chrome extension, but I think it doesn't support markdown. I use it and I'm happy with it. They have an advanced subscription for 'advanced' linguistic checking and furthermore, the gold service is hiring a human proof-reader. It's interesting.
- geoelectric 10y agoDo any of this type of tool have an offline version or plugin that would work on Mac? I'd love to use one, but I can't use a web app for confidential information. I'd be happy to install a bundle in vim, Sublime Text, emacs, or whatever.
- vijaykiran 10y agoI use https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://github.com/amperser/proselint with emacs fly check support + e-prime mode.
- transpy 10y agoI say it is interesting. It's from the same guys from 'Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences'. AFAIK, here they are implementing automatic summarization, aided presumably by the accuracy of their parser. I signed up and I look forward to trying it.
- bearcobra 10y agoThe variable pricing is pretty interesting. In one session I got $1, $3 and $5, while another gave $5, $12, and $20. $5 felt like a good deal considering what I pay annually for Grammarly. I'd be curious what their average is.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Anthony-G 10y agoI’m an admirer of the writing of George Orwell so I thought it would be fitting to paste the first two paragraphs of his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”. It suggested removing a number of modifier phrases. These phrases were not redundant and removing them would result in loss of important detail, information and/or emphasis. In some cases removing those words would result in nonsensical or syntactically incorrect sentences. Further experimentation showed that it complained about “mostly” and “many” as modifiers but not “some”. It highlighted a number of long noun phrases but none of these could be suitably shortened, and Orwell’s uses of the passive voice were mostly appropriate; re-phrasing these to be in the active voice would result in awkward prose. Its left branching sentences were not rambling at all. On the plus side, I thought its highlighting of long sentences worked well but not all long sentences are difficult to parse and a succession of multiple short sentences can have an unnatural rhythm. It also failed to take into account that colons and semi-colons can be used to separate main clauses. I wouldn’t use it myself, but I can see how it could be a useful tool for considering how a sentence can be rephrased and encouraging awareness of the issues it highlights.