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Hemingway Editor
- MattGaiser 6y agoWhat is the big differentiator between this and Grammarly? They seem to have slightly different goals, but not sure where the dividing line is.
- amerine 6y agoThis is older.
- silentwanderer 6y agoThe free version of Grammarly is a spelling/grammar checker, while Hemingway seems to enforce a particular style of writing.
- corytheboyd 6y agoI really like the simplicity of using color coded highlights to communicate different errors. It probably goes without saying that this may make more sense as a browser extension that hijacks textarea etc. The scope increases quite a bit, but it would be far more useful, as nobody wants to edit writing in one place and paste it into another.
- nkozyra 6y agoThese are good guidelines for producing the kind of sterile content technical folks might end up writing. Ambiguity, hedge words and verbosity can definitely hurt in that context. That type of writing can be a negative in other contexts. In creative contexts it ends up producing very monotonous text that's tiring and uninteresting. In casual conversation (email, slack, etc.) it tends to feel inauthentic and/or cold. That said, this tool handles all of this well. I think the UX is terrific.
- a_c 6y agoI think the app follows largely with the suggestion in "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft". Using active voice instead of passive, avoid adverb, etc. Steve King writes good fiction IMO.
- sebmellen 6y agoThe following was written using Hemingway App: I bought this app a while ago. It's nice, but note it will make your writing succinct. Sometimes more succinct than it needs to be. I also wish the app had basic features like find and replace, which it lacks. This writing is all approved, but if I write a longer sentence, it will give me a yellow line. This means that if I write a sentence in my normal length, about some topic that necessitates a longer sentence, it will give me a red or yellow highlight. This highlight makes it hard to read the text.
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoIt's better thought of as a guide for writing in an effective style. Not a guide for writing well. Or properly. Most people have never consciously changed their writing style. That exercise has value in itself. And there are worse styles one could imitate than Hemingway.
- abnry 6y agoYes. The app seems very useful in that regard. But I would like it to emphasize the style aspects of it, not some objective standard of "too complicated sentences".
- dragonwriter 6y ago> And there are worse styles one could imitate than Hemingway. Certainly, including the one promoted by the app, which doesn't imitate Hemingway's style; at best it imitates a naive application of a maxim Hemingway reported as being influential early writing advice that he had received.
- sirk390 6y agoWhat I don't like in this text is the sentence without verb "Sometimes more succinct than it needs to be."
- sebmellen 6y agoThis was enforced by Hemingway. I originally wrote "Sometimes it forces me to be more succinct than I need to be", but that was flagged as a "confusing sentence" for some reason.
- pugworthy 6y agoKind of interesting to feed it actual Hemmingway excerpts - which it sometimes complains about. Surprisingly I'm finding it complains about Cormac McCarthy and Hemmingway equally, at least based on the very small sample of excerpts I'm giving it. But then you throw in something like this from All the Pretty Horses and it's got strong opinions... "In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives."
- toshiromifune 6y agoHemingway? Just try pasting the following text there: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
- mattmoose21 6y agoHaha, I tried the same thing with For Whom The Bell Tolls, and got similar results.
- richeyryan 6y agoI think Hemingway's style has become a bit of a meme that doesn't really reflect the reality of his writing. The last sentence in that excerpt from Farewell to Arms is a great example. Each individual clause is simple enough but he likes to connect them all together to create one connected image. The results from the Hemingway app can be disjointed and lack that flow.
- toshiromifune 6y agoAgree. Hemingway is more about poetry, which is when you manage to say a lot using relatively few words, put in the right order.
- zaltekk 6y agoOof. Doesn't redirect to HTTPS. If you load the link (www. prefixed) with HTTPS, you'll get a certificate only for the bare domain. This is probably over-indexing, but I don't think I'd trust a software company with all of my communications if the they can't get HTTPS right on their homepage.
- 1f60c 6y agoI think Hemingway (the website) is several years old at this point and not under active development.
- porker 6y agoHow does this app work behind-the-scenes? I'd guessed it had been fed a corpus of Hemingway, and was using similarity matching. Judging by other comments here, it hasn't.
- xibalba 6y agoSomeone took a stab at explaining/recreating it here: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/https-medium-com-samwcoding-deconstructing-the-hemingway-app-8098e22d878d/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/https-medium-com-samwcodin...
- sepnax 6y agoWould be nice if you could integrate some kind of spelling checker with it. I'm not fluent in English so it would be nice to not have to copy paste the text somewhere else to make sure there isn't any silly spelling mistakes.
- ibudiallo 6y agoI love this app so much that I'm sometimes reluctant to share it with people. I'm afraid if it becomes too popular they'll add new features and ruin it. My process of writing anything goes through this tool. I write in a plain text file to avoid distraction. Then run it through this app to simplify the writing and make it more legible. Then I pass it through scribens, another tool in my pipeline to catch mistakes. Since I can never find someone to read and edit my work, I convert it to audio and using a TTS reader. It drastically improves my writing.
- ysfah 6y agoI can relate to your feelings for sure. I'm using Workflowy to brainstorm and capture ideas and Ulysses for writing. I appreciate both products for being clean and simple to use and not bloated with unnecessary features.
- Cactus2018 6y agoTried finding this app recently, but used the incorrect search term "the Kurt Vonnegut App".
- toshiromifune 6y agoyes! It should be called Kurt Vonnegut. Apart from "passive voice" (oh, come on!) the following works perfectly: And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
- evo_9 6y agoHemingway 'clone' and source code: ttps://www.freecodecamp.org/news/https-medium-com-samwcoding-deconstructing-the-hemingway-app-8098e22d878d/
- ravenstine 6y agoDoes this actually do what it claims, or is it just an illusion? The sentences highlighted in red in its example aren't particularly difficult to read. If your audience can't understand this: > If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red. ... the problem probably isn't you, but that you have the wrong audience to start with. I'm guessing that this is just using a combination of Flesch-Kincaid, for readability scoring, and probably some libraries by Wooorm for detecting complex words and passive voice, among other things. Maybe I'm wrong. What makes a sentence bad isn't necessarily how complex it is, but how much it is able to communicate with a given density. There's no way that traditional readability algorithms like Flesch-Kincaid can possibly score that. What would be more useful would be something that could detect vagueness of text, but haven't tried to solve this problem in the past, I found no such thing in existence. This isn't to say that readability scores aren't useful, but they always need to be taken with a grain of salt and be used more as a guide than anything else.
- Spooky23 6y agoAll of this stuff is subjective to some extent. A newspaper columnist, novel author and manual writer will have different principles that apply to their writing. The sentence you quoted is complex, and may readers will miss meaning, especially if it is presented an instruction.
- ravenstine 6y agoFor sure because, to me, that sentence pales in contrast to the meandering prose in most news stories. Just my opinion.
- mrweasel 6y agoIt may be because I’m not a native English speaker, but the highlighted sentence is pretty hard to read. I lose track of the words around half way. After “get lost” I want the sentence to stop. My brain split the sentence right there, meaning the remaing part has no context, it’s just words the fail to belong. It’s not that I’m a poor reader. I do real slower in English, but I can easily read something like The Economist.
- moralsupply 6y agoStylistically, it should be called Chuck Palahniuk App
- kareemm 6y agoI've used it for years. It's a good tool. But it'd be better as a Google Docs plugin. My workflow goes from Gdocs => edit in Hemingway => paste back in Gdocs => export to Markdown.
- zemnmez 6y agoi'm really struggling to find a great work of literature that this app doesn't think is terrible. the idea is conceptually neat, and the UX is nice though constructively, think a lot of these decisions are too strict, for example 'perhaps you already know this' is asked to be replaced with 'you already know this'. Even murakami, who writes in the very clear way the app looks for gets flagged up: > Both elbows on the table, I covered my face with my palms. Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain [softly](<-- 'use a forceful verb') falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining. > > Until someone came and [lightly](<-- use a forceful verb) rested a hand on my shoulder, my thoughts were of the sea
- jonas21 6y agoHonestly, that's a good thing. I assume this is targeted mostly at a business communication use case, similar to Grammarly and others. Clear, unambiguous, and standardized communication is far more important in this context than in literary fiction. If someone at work sent me a design doc and it read like Ulysses, I would not be pleased.
- wcarey 6y agoThe trend towards using syntactic machines to teach people to write perplexes me because writing is foremost about meaning. For example, the Gettysburg address begins: > Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. Hemingway flags that as passive voice, but it's actually a present progressive construction. Rather than computers making us more fully human, they strive to make us more machine like, and that's a worry.
- Spinnaker_ 6y agoThe problem is that for every Lincoln you have hundreds of thousands of people who will never put together a sentence of that caliber, myself included. I don't worry about great writers using this app and becoming more machine like. But everyday I come across documentation or emails that would benefit from this app.
- wcarey 6y agoI suppose I haven't given up on the idea that all of us can aim at being more fully human. You might be able to put together a sentence of that caliber! Particularly if you read a large corpus of great writing. The worry is that young writers will become more machine-like in their thoughts, as part of a broader project to make people more machine like. For example, Google Docs complained to me that the sentence, "We will analyze the ballistics of the South Dakota, focusing on parameterizing the equations of motion" was incorrect because you don't put "the" in front of the name of a state. But I was talking about BB-57, the USS South Dakota, a battleship. Google Docs, naturally, doesn't have a sense of historical context. I'm no great writer, to be sure, but the computer just doesn't understand what I mean, so it flags my thoughts as being wrong in some way. That smoothing out our thoughts is a long-term problem if our goal is to lead human lives, particularly as it makes it into education.
- throwaway201103 6y agoYes. Tools like this are great for business writing where clarity and concision are priorities over literary beauty. I'd like to see what it makes of the average software TOS agreement.
- ordinaryradical 6y agoThis is really only going to make your writing "bold and clear" if you prefer one specific style of writing, something perhaps akin to how Hemingway wrote. I pasted in the first line of 100 Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, considered to be one of the greatest opening lines of 20th century literature, and was warned for its length and complexity. Writing which has aesthetic appeal cannot be boiled down to a heuristic which prizes one element (simplicity) over all others. You can develop interesting writing, and even beautiful writing that way. You can notice bad habits and avoid them. But writing is not so simple as to have one expressive path which creates "boldness" and "clarity."
- narenkeshav 6y agoI would love to see a chrome extension of the same.
- scudd 6y agoThis reminds of the technical writing education I received in college. While I understand the goal of this guidance is to make technical communication as clear and concise as possible, I also feel like it leads to a world of boring writers. And (IMO) boring communication actually should be recognized as worse communication, in comparison to communication that combines technical detail with human deliverance. The problem is all the more exacerbated when the guidance uses a checklist-like rubric such as: -"this sentence exceeds X word count, consider splitting" -"this sentence uses passive voice, use active voice". I remember "revising" parts of my senior design to score higher against a similar rubric, despite being confident that the revision was overall worse. Writing quality is inherently subjective, maybe to the chagrin of engineering types. Even though there are horrendous emails and documentation in the wild, I still think teaching people how to write with tools like this isn't the solution.
- sokoloff 6y agoWhat is a better solution? For business writing, just consistently considering the active voice would improve many writers’ output. “It was decided that we’d lower shipping prices.” versus “Chris decided to lower our shipping prices.” I don’t know if writers choose the former because it feels fancier, because they notice other writers doing it (maybe because they struggled to read what was written and took notice of the pattern?), or because they don’t know or don’t want to commit to what actually happened, but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.
- stiglitz 6y agoPassive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus. The choice between active and passive voice should be based on this choice of focus. You can’t say categorically that the active voice is better than passive, classical rule of thumb notwithstanding.
- whatshisface 6y ago>Passive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus. Behold, the most important thing to know about business writing: >Chris broke the build. >The build was broken.
- myself248 6y agoI'm very curious what the Hemingway estate has to say about this. I recall a certain "distraction-free electronic typewriter" that renamed itself after launching with a Hemingway-derived name.
- a_band 6y agoOr you could toil until you can write clearly in your own distinct voice. It's harder but it's more rewarding. Why let an app have all the fun?
- axguscbklp 6y agoI think Hemingway wrote in a terse manner because it helped him to convey a certain atmosphere and notion of depth beyond what the bare words presented, not because he was trying to simplify things so that people who lack high-level English skills could follow what he was saying. >If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red. Some readers. Not everyone writes with the intention of reaching the largest possible audience. Of course many people do write with that intention, and in many contexts that is a very good intention, but it seems to me that to associate such simplification with Hemingway the writer is misleading.
- matchbok 6y agoLong sentences are not necessarily bad. I'm surprised something focused on writing doesn't understand this.
- yreg 6y agoThey are not bad here and there. They are however bad when you cram them all over the place, unless you are going for a particular style. Long ago I used this tool for my thesis and I think it did help me with the stylistics. Including pruning too many, too long sentences.
- jfdi 6y agoThis is nice! Is there an api for it?
- fgumo 6y agoI want to highlight that apps like this one (or Grammarly) are very useful for those of us who don't speak English as a first language but use it every day. By the way, we are a lot! I get that they tend to foster a very specific writing style that can be boring, but most comms are not about fun but about conveying a message. I would not write a novel following their advice, but they are useful to replace a few words or add a comma here and there.
- afkqs 6y agoIs only English supported at this stage? There is no mention about other languages in the FAQ or checkout page so I'd assume so.
- stfods 6y agoThere's a similar application for Russian language: https://glvrd.ru/ https://glvrd.ru/
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI used this for years while blogging. I was frequently complimented on my clear writing style. It really helped with my addiction to long run-on sentences. I think of it as training wheels - eventually I didn't need it, but it was really useful at the start.
- lallysingh 6y agoIt looks lovely, but this isn't the audience for this. Who here doesn't already have a favorite editor? I mean, if there was a command-line tool I could wrap up in elisp in a flyspell sort of way... I'd pay you more than $20.
- whymauri 6y agoI was split between Hemingway and Grammarly and ended up choosing in Grammarly. Hemingway, IMO, makes your writing clear, but it also makes it incredibly boring. Grammarly has modular settings for formality, tone, friendliness, etc which lets me view grammar-based tips while preserving my personal writing style.
- erikbye 6y agoAt the moment, the tone setting gives you nothing. "Experimental. How do you want to sound? This helps us build new suggestions and won't affect your feedback today."
- whymauri 6y agoThe audience, formality, and domain expertise settings definitely work. And the tone settings do actually give feedback on the lower-right-hand side of the text input box in the form of emojis (albeit still experimental).
- erikbye 6y ago> And the tone settings do actually give feedback on the lower-right-hand side of the text input box in the form of emojis (albeit still experimental). That is not my experience. I ran multiple, longer paragraphs through it now, no emojis displayed.
- whymauri 6y agoHuh, that's weird. Maybe they're A/B testing this feature. I've had it for a few months.
- varispeed 6y agoCan this be self-hosted? What stops me from using these kind of tools is the fact I don't know who can read it and what they could do with it. I may occasionally paste some work in progress documentation that will be public anyway, but anything private I don't think I would ever trust such app unless I am hosting it myself.
- JPLeRouzic 6y agoIt is pure Javascript, you can use it locally after a few tweaks in the code. There are few lines that phone pingdom, you can just removed them.
- Pentamerous 6y agoThey sell a desktop app version which is advertised as "no internet connection required". Only supports Windows and Mac tho.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI write the way I write. Some folks like it, some don't. Writing styles need to conform to the task at hand. I tend to write fairly "wordy" articles about tech subjects; trying to make them engaging. Probably not so good, for tech documentation. I really feel that there's no substitute for practice.
- nbeleski 6y agoI wonder how the passive voice detection is done... could be useful for a colleague research of writting patterns.
- wcarey 6y agoIncorrectly. It mistakes non-passive constructions for passive. For example, "The sailors are spent." is marked as passive despite not containing an action verb. It looks like it's just regexing on forms of "to be" followed by words ending in "ed" (perhaps also using a dictionary of some irregulars)?
- nxpnsv 6y agoI hate active voice, but the app is pretty useful at times
- rodolphoarruda 6y agoThis reminded me of an idea that circulated within the consulting group of one of my previous employers, Blackboard. The idea was to build something like this app, but to run in the background of the LMS analyzing and rating every student input (email, wiki, forums etc.). That would generate analytics for the student, faculty and administration. Interesting for regions like Latin America where control over the native language, even in higher-education, is not always a given.
- geocrasher 6y agoThis reminds me a lot of the coaching given by the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. That actually did help me become a better writer as I blogged, but I really think this methodology is limited. PERFECT Grammar is optional. (edited from "Grammar is optional" because people didn't recognize the hyperbole. My bad) Sure, you have to have the basic grammar that everyone understands so that your writing can be understood. Beyond that, style takes over. I learned this from a newspaper columnist years ago. He didn't follow the Exact Rules. He made up some of his own, and his writing was better for it! And so it is with me. I write to be understood and hopefully easy to read, and maybe, just maybe, be entertaining. Grammar is only part of the equation for me. So what do I tell people? Use these tools (Grammarly, Hemmingway, etc) to become a better writer, and when you feel like you've met your goal, toss them. They're good for the purpose, but will limit you in the long run.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- msla 6y ago> Grammar is optional. Grammar is mandatory. Following a specific style guide is optional. I really, really wish more people understood the difference between grammar, which is how a language works, and style, which is how a specific organization or person has decreed that language must be used or else they will become very, very cross with you.
- dsr_ 6y agoEnglish flexible very. Grammar optional. Convey much thinkings philosophy attitude deliberate dissonance. Education class wealth signifiers == code switching; academic pretense. Audience knowledge crucial. one style !fits all.
- cbozeman 6y agoI understood the ideas you're trying to convey, but the annoyance I experienced with the conveyance was palpable. :)
- forrestthewoods 6y agoHemingway App is amazing and everyone should use it. I’ve been using it to edit my blog posts for... 5 years? 10 years? As long as I can remember. That doesn’t mean you should take all Hemingway App suggestions. It sometimes struggles with technical writing. It’s ok to ignore some suggestions. But use the app. I am 100% confident your writing will be better because of it.
- SMAAART 6y agoOk, I have an upcoming writing project and decided: why not? So I made my $19.99 purchase for a good cause. But Hemingway is a bit of an island. Once you have a document ready, how do you use that creation? You can export in .doc format (good). But one can only import a .docx format. Why is that?
- blueboo 6y agoIf you were wondering if this exists as a Docs add-on, it seems it does, in part: https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/writers_highlighter/1033878279784 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/writers_highlighte...
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910444 (1 comment) 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7223969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7223969
- lykahb 6y agoThe English language is my second language that I learned quite late. I appreciate its beauty with all quirks and complexity. Good writing is not an intrinsic property of the text - it is defined within a context of message and reader. Who is this product for? Business correspondence, tech specs, technical books, or school essays? The style is usually not consistent throughout the same text. Intro or side notes are often less formal than the body. Applying the same standard of writing to all texts preaches mediocrity as a virtue. I would prefer a tool that instead of telling me what to do, would only offer insights into the text. With AI's insights of sentiment, writing style, and several metrics of complexity, one could use that guidance for the same goals as this app and many more.
- FroshKiller 6y agoYour English is very good based on this comment. It sounds formal, but that formality reads as coming from your personality rather than writing textbook English.
- frutiger 6y agoThere may have been a typo though, I think "with all its quirks" would be more correct.
- FroshKiller 6y agoI quibble with you there. "With all quirks and complexity" is grammatically correct and understandable as it is. I agree that "with all its quirks and complexity" is more idiomatic, though. For what it's worth, I read it as "with all its quirks and complexity" because my brain just filled in the "its" I expected, which it might not have done if the English had been worse.
- lykahb 6y agoThank you. I had a lot of early influence from the old English textbooks from the 80s that have more formal style and reading technical documentation. Until I started watching movies without dub, all English I studied was quite far from the real-life use of language. My peers who did more listening than reading have a more natural style.
- mikpanko 6y agoI have built a similar tool to help me edit my PhD thesis a few years back: https://expresso-app.org/ https://expresso-app.org/. It helped me improve my writing but was also picked up by some English teachers to use as a scalable way for providing initial feedback to students, so they can later focus on deeper feedback in their own grading. So I now keep the tool running for the small community.
- SanchoPanda 6y agoThis is a wonderful tool, thanks for making this available.
- intrepidhero 6y agoFirst the praise: For learning technical writing where clarity is the ultimate goal this might be really useful as a first draft editor. I'm certain I would benefit from using this tool to improve my writing skills. The UI looks very nice, not just stylish but functional in a non-intrusive way and that is a great accomplishment. But my initial gut reaction after realizing what the app was doing was horror. Hemingway Editor appears to present some fairly opinionated ideas, steering a writer towards being very concise and using a simple vocabulary. But the counter point is that in a world where the written word is the primary mode of communication we desperately need to develop our own voices. Yes, even in technical writing.
- bschne 6y agoThis reminded me of this blogpost Caterina Fake wrote after discovering a similar tool a while back [1]. As others have mentioned here, this should be seen in context. I applaud governments trying to make explanations for official procedures or legal questions clear, concise, and understandable to laypeople no matter their educational background. I applaud striving to make one's explanations as clear as possible. But I don't think simplistic, dogmatic rules can achieve that, and I don't think it's desirable or virtuous in all contexts. 1. https://caterina.net/2020/08/02/vocabulary-loss-and-the-narrowing-of-understanding/ https://caterina.net/2020/08/02/vocabulary-loss-and-the-narr...
- ape4 6y agoMaybe there should be an app that turns your Hemingway-style text into corporate-talk. eg "now" -> "at this point in time". "use" -> "utilize". "what it does" -> "functionality"
- habanany 6y agoDo you want to learn how to write? Listen to this Jordan B. Peterson podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000460444647 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-...
- lifeisgreat1 6y agoThis looks like a great tool to write low level click-bait blog content.
- craigkerstiens 6y agoThis is hands down one of my favorite tools. When advising people on content/blogging/marketing this is the one I always recommend. In building up a content engine the first piece is always around velocity... just practice getting more out there. Get used to publishing two posts a week, and over time it'll come faster. The next step is quality, but using hemingway early on is a good shortcut to level up the quality. I generally recommend a grade level not above 8 for a blog post, and 6 is ideal. Even beyond blog posts I find it is useful for any communication that goes out to some set of people. If you're spending time drafting an email to your internal team, asking a favor of someone, just about anything where you really want to level up the quality hemingway is a huge positive impact for not much effort.
- aidenn0 6y agoI would consider my writing a failure if I didn't have at least one paragraph with at least one highlight under these rules. I can't imagine reading more than a page or two of text that passes these rules; the flat writing style encouraged by this is the sort that will cause me to lose attention rapidly.
- cjf4 6y agoI'm sure someone has done this before but Hemingway app ironically has a lot of feedback for this random passage I pulled from the Old Man and the Sea. https://imgur.com/a/5vheg0w https://imgur.com/a/5vheg0w
- mixmastamyk 6y agoLooks interesting. I had to use DDG to find information about it however. Hurdles: Doesn't appear to support Linux, I do have Windows in a VM however. The bulk of my writing is in RST and Markdown. Can this edit text files directly? Export is too clumsy. Also, I don't see anything about privacy. I'd expect the desktop to maintain it and the browser version not to. But, I'd like some confirmation.
- willyg123 6y agoFor a good laugh, visit the Hemingway homepage with the Grammarly chrome extension installed.
- slaymaker1907 6y agoI might end up using this. I write pretty long sentences and this would be useful for me when trying to write things that are easier to read.
- grawprog 6y agoThat's kind of interesting. For fun I took a bunch of my hn comments and some comments and threads i've made in other forums. Apparently I consistently write at a grade 10 level, which is ok, but I should aim for 9, I use at least two very complicated sentences and a few complicated sentences. I also tend to regularly choose words with simpler alternatives. The information's cool and all, but i'm not really too sure what to make of it or what I should do with this information.
- cybert00th 6y agoI'm sure there are many good uses for Hemingway, but we have to submit website maintenance emails to it and edit them until they pass before we're allowed to send them. And we also have to give our customers 2 weeks notice of upcoming maintenance. It once took me 4 days before a senior manager would agree to sign off a maintenance email. Leaving our customers with 10 days notice. The expression "slaves to the machine" comes to mind.
- bondarchuk 6y agoIt seems like you are slave to a bunch of fuckin' idjits, and it's not the machines.
- 1970-01-01 6y agoThe link is for http. Use https://hemingwayapp.com https://hemingwayapp.com
- localhost 6y agoThere is so much bad writing in corporate settings that a tool like this should be welcomed instead of being nit-picked to death. I find that a lot of folks try to sound "smarter" by writing in opaque jargon-y prose instead of just getting to the point of what they're saying.
- lemax 6y agoI have used similar editors in the past and since stopped. But, I found that the way these tools tend to train you to write has a long term impact. One of my newer colleagues often seems to choose the most complex words possible. I'm not sure if it's an imposter syndrome thing, maybe they feel the need to overcompensate, or they actually never learned the benefits of simpler word choice. I wish more people would learn the art of Writing Like You Talk. http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
- leephillips 6y agoPeople should not write as they speak, nor, usually, speak as they write. That they should is a favorite fallacy of schoolteachers. The written and spoken versions of a language are slightly different dialects; what works on the page is often less than optimal to the ear, and the tricks and colloquialisms of conversation are out of place in most written contexts. I shudder to think what this electronic nanny would make of the prose of Nabokov or Poe. The former author described Hemingway as a “writer of books for boys.”
- grawprog 6y agoI tend to write and speak pretty similarly depending on the situation. Something informal like a comment thread, I write a lot closer to the way I actually speak. Though...I probably swear a lot less. Formal writing though is something totally different. Whatever kind of writing you have to think of the audience and the tone you want to convey. When I want to write conversationally, I try and emulate the way I talk, when I want to write in a different way, I change the tone of my writing. This comment went more towards the formal, explanatory style in the end I suppose. I've always found context matters the most for the tone of writing though. Sometimes a natural, conversational style emulating the way you speak is good, sometimes not. But it's the same for speaking as well. Speaking in front of people or in some kind of formal situation is a totally different kind of speaking than chillin' with your friends at a party. You don't speak the same way in those two situations, it's the same with writing. It always depends on the audience and the context.
- JackFr 6y agoIt repeatedly identified adverbs modifying adjectives and told me to replace with a stronger verb. E.g. That advice is simply wrong. use a forceful verb
- azhenley 6y agoThis seems like it might be nice for technical writing, but won't it reduce creative writing to a boring, uninspired prose?
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoThe key is to use tools like this selectively. I often use a style checker on my fiction, to highlight repeated words, sentence fragments, passive voice, overused words, and clichés. Most of the suggestions I ignore (particularly sentence fragments, which I use a lot in stories), but it's still a good exercise in making me consider whether I can rephrase sentences to be stronger or more interesting. Sometimes passive voice is what you want, but sometimes the sentence is better in an active voice; it's easy to overuse intensifiers like "really" and "very"; and there's a few other verbal tics that tools like that can catch. Technical writing may be a bit more formal, but you still have to selectively apply suggestions from tools like this. Having said all that, I find Hemingway Editor to be infuriatingly bad at this. It's terrible at actually editing, while it's a plain text editor it's not Markdown-aware, and it doesn't actually catch the sort of things I'd want such a tool to watch for (like "actually" earlier in this sentence). Its primary function is to harangue you about sentence length.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoIf you're on the fence about this, go find some writing you love and copy paste it into here. I pasted the first chapter of some of my favorite authors' best books into it and each of them got assessed at Grade 3 writing level, even Rothfuss. And it lit up a bunch of clear sentences as hard to read. What makes a long winding sentence hard to read is the switchbacks and nested bits. You want to keep moving without doubling back. If you split up clauses, having things modify other things across long distances with other ideas in between, it can get complicated. vs It can get complicated if you split up clauses, having things modify other things across long distances with other ideas in between. Both are flagged by the app, but the latter takes up less working memory and can be "parsed in constant space" as the sentence grows. Academic writing is littered with this issue.
- partyboat1586 6y ago>If you split up clauses, having things modify other things across long distances with other ideas in between, it can get complicated. I found this version easier to read. I think because with the other one I have to remember the beginning part of "It can get complicated" and try to apply that to all the conditions that come up throughout the rest of the sentence. I prefer to build up the picture of 'split clauses', 'long distance modifications' etc and then classify this as complicated afterwards rather than start with the classification.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoYeah, with just a few splits/nestings, it can go either way. It's only when you get a whole bunch that it gets difficult. I think I came up with a poor, lazy example.
- amingilani 6y agoI'd like to see other people's solutions. Mine at grade 5 was: The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors. If you see a yellow sentence, shorten, or split it. A red highlight is dense, and complicated. Your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, and splitting logic. Try editing the last sentence to remove the red. You can use a shorter word in place of a purple one, mouse over them for hints. Phrases marked in blue are either weakening or adverbs. Please get rid of them, and pick words with force. Phrases marked in green show passive voice. You can format your text with the toolbar. Paste in something you're working on, and edit away. Or, click the Write button and compose something new.
- GCA10 6y agoCouldn't resist the temptation. I grabbed the opening paragraph of Hemingway's own short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- and put it to the test. Danger alert! Danger alert! The master himself opens with a 110-word, two-sentence paragraph. The first sentence is flagged yellow. The second one is flagged red. By the software's system, Hemingway's own writing is in trouble. Truth is, this app is a nifty diagnostic tool that will help you avoid some writing goofs, if you use it judiciously. But if you let it dictate every change, you'll lose the full rhythms of good writing. Even a master of lean writing (Hemingway himself) knew when to bulk up, even for just a moment, to create a cadence that could surprise and intrigue us.
- arielm 6y agoThat’s a really good point, and is also how I see other similar apps like grammarly. They can help highlight issues and it’s up to you to decide whether those really are issues or just personal stylistic choices. I’m a user of both.
- CharlesW 6y ago> They can help highlight issues and it’s up to you to decide whether those really are issues or just personal stylistic choices. That's a great way to frame it. I find Grammarly useful, but grammar checkers will never be (human) language linters.
- Alex3917 6y ago> Even a master of lean writing (Hemingway himself) knew when to bulk up, even for just a moment, to create a cadence that could surprise and intrigue us. There are other considerations too beyond just sound. E.g. recently someone (helpfully) pointed out to me that I had used the word 'super' as a filler word 20+ times in one essay. Which is good to be aware of, and I got rid of some of them. But at the same time, in most of the cases the reason I had done it is because if you have two long and complicated words next to each other, just visually it's difficult to read them. In the same way that whitespace is necessary in between paragraphs in order to make text readable, you also need horizontal whitespace to prevent the words from running together and the meaning getting lost, and to give people time to digest complicated ideas.
- fungiblecog 6y agoThe way to improve writing is to learn to write, not to lean on the crutch of an 'app'. The 'app for everything' mentality is turning people braindead.
- alexbrower 6y agoIs there a news story here that I'm not seeing as I scroll through the comments? (Have been using / recommending Hemingway App for a few years. Great product.)
- alan_n 6y agoAs a writer I hate these types of apps. As others have pointed out, when you put real popular works in them, they light up like christmas trees. But very few have touched on why. One thing you learn as a writer is you want varied sentence structure * . Also good prose has a sort of rhythm, both in the words used and the lengths of the sentences (this is also imo why translations rarely compare to the originals). If you make all your sentences the same length it sucks the rhythm out. As for everything else it highlights, they're all just tools. A long word or a passive voice used in the right place can work better than the "correct" alternative. Writing is about knowing which tools to use when. In some ways, writing is very similar to visual design. People don't notice why some writing is good. It's just a bunch of tiny choices that all add up, but also if you use comic sans you're dooming yourself to failure. What do I actually suggest to writers? Read your story out loud (tts can help to pick out errors as well, but rarely rhythm related errors). If you mentally stumble or backtrack reading a sentence, something is wrong. If you feel like you need to pause but there is no pause, something is wrong. Same with the opposite. Finally, put the story away for a month and try it again. Rinse and repeat until polished. * Like everything, this also just a tool. You can not use it and still have amazing prose that matches the situation (e.g. one long run-on sentence to emulate a stream of consciousness).
- lilyball 6y ago> The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. This was highlighted in yellow. I don’t see anything wrong with this sentence. Replacing the semicolon with a period makes the editor happy, but does not seem like a positive change. > If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red. This sentence is highlighted in red, and yet it does not seem dense or complex. Even removing the suffix doesn’t fix the red. This really feels like it’s literally just penalizing you from writing anything other than short sentences. Deleting characters from the end of this makes it turn yellow once i get it to > … follow its meandering, splitting log “logi” is red, “log” is yellow. Who is this editor even intended for? What sort of writing would be improved with these automated restrictions?
- lloyddobbler 6y agoAs a writer, I hate apps like this. As a web writer, I love them. I've been using this app for at least the past 7 years. I wouldn't use it for any other type of writing. However, when the medium dictates succinct, direct writing without fluff, this app is an amazing tool.
- jacobsenscott 6y agoI like long complex sentences.
- sharmi 6y agoI am not associated with this app but I think this who it is intended for. Office email senders Bloggers Marketers Basically anyone whose readers are going to make split second decisions on whether to read writer's text, readers with short attention spans.
- anigbrowl 6y agoI like it. In general, writing should be short and to the point. On the other hand, I also enjoy reading and writing long complex sentences precisely because the audience for them is limited to people who want to put in the work to understand them.