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The trend towards using syntactic machines to teach people to write perplexes me because writing is foremost about meaning. For example, the Gettysburg address

• Spinnaker_ 6y ago
  The 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    Yes. 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.
    • wcarey 6y ago
      The difficulty, of course, is that clarity is primarily a function of ideas and meaning, and ideas and meaning are totally opaque to tools like this. For example, no complaints about this sentence: > The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thur. And if I change the sentence to: > The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thurs. it tells me my reading level has changed from 7th to 8th grade despite Thurs being a much more common shortening of "Thursday" than "Thur", which is nonsense. God forbid such tools ever be used with young students.
• bananamerica 6y ago
  Ideally such tools should be used as helpers, not as sacred. You what to comply with when to what degree.
  • a1369209993 6y ago
    As the saying goes, rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.
• aazaa 6y ago
  Wouldn't present progressive be "Now we are engaging..."? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous Either way, active can really change the meaning: "Now we fight/pursue/battle in/confront a great civil war..." The passive voice (combined with the weak verb "to be engaged") emphasizes a future without the war ("we" and "endure"), not riling people up to fight it. As you imply, passive voice is a tool humans can use to influence other humans. Of course, any tool can be abused, but that's no reason to yank it out of the box.
• Veen 6y ago
  It uses a simple algorithm to detect passives: be + past participle. It can't detect passives that don't follow that pattern, such as prepositional passives and get passives, and it labels some clauses as passive when they aren't. Ironically, if you chose a random passage from Hemingway instead of Lincoln, it would litter that with spurious warnings too.
• thelastwave 6y ago
  Why is that a worry? What's wrong with being machine-like? I feel like this attitude reflects a bias against machines and machine-like people that could lead to discrimination against them.
  • thelastwave 6y ago
    The fact that I just got downvoted just proves my point. This sort of bigotry is very real.
  • wcarey 6y ago
    My particular objections to people being made machine like are rooted in a Christian conception of the inherent worth of humans as being made in the image of God (who is not a machine). Being machine-like impedes our progress towards our telos.
    • thelastwave 6y ago
      TBH, it would seem to be our telos, the way things are headed.
• 1-more 6y ago
  "We are engaged" is passive though. Specifically its form is passive: be + past participle. But its meaning is more reflexive than anything else. I don't know what the subject of that sentence would be in an active construction. Maybe "We have engaged ourselves in a great…" or possibly a bit more poetic "Fate has engaged us in a…". But this really speaks to your original point that a passive _construction_ (not necessarily meaning) does not always hide information the reader needs.
  • a1369209993 6y ago
    > I don't know what the subject of that sentence would be in an active construction. Wouldn't that just be "Now we engage in a great civil war, [...]"?
    • Wistar 6y ago
      In a great civil war we now engage.
  • gweinberg 6y ago
    Yeah, if a couple really wanted to avoid the passive voice, instead of saying "we got engaged" they should say "we engaged each other". But I don't think that really conveys the intended meaning. The same thing is true of of the Lincoln speech, in a somewhat different way. Does anyone really need to be warned that they are using the passive voice? Does anyone actually do that by accident?
    • throwaway201103 6y ago
      I think people use passive voice unintentionally or thoughtlessly. Not sure if you'd call that "by accident." I see it quite often in business writing, I think people fall into it because it's a way to avoid taking responsibility. "It has been decided" vs. "I have decided." I would not say that it's always intentional.
    • mjrbrennan 6y ago
      > Does anyone really need to be warned that they are using the passive voice? Does anyone actually do that by accident? Yes, all the time. I write a lot and still fall into the trap, and it is hard not to do it sometimes especially if you were only introduced to the concept later in life. I try hard not to use the passive voice, but there are times when I think it is acceptable, and there are occasions where the alternative is more confusing. The quoted speech "Now we are engaged in a great civil war..." sounds perfectly fine to me! Honestly, I have trouble thinking of an alternative sometimes, even when I can identify a passive voice sentence.
• vanusa 6y ago
  Good catch - but the thing to remember is, Hemingway isn't meant for writing great, historic speeches. It's basically meant for corporate emails, blog posts and the like.
• ponker 6y ago
  A writing app isn't there to turn Obama into Lincoln, it's there to get completely dysfunctional prose to borderline readable. I don't think there's any risk that Thomas Pynchon starts using this in a misguided attempt to emulate Hemingway.
• nrclark 6y ago
  Fwiw, the Gettysburg address would have been pretty bad as prose. It was written to be delivered as a speech. A speaker can control inflection and intonation, which add their own meaning and interact with the actual word choices. Written word has no such luxury. Also, the Gettysburg Address was written 150 years ago. Language norms change over time.
  • hnick 6y ago
    Millions of high school students who had to read Shakespeare agree on both points.
• caconym_ 6y ago
  Society itself is trying to make us more machine-like, and it bends the practice of writing to that end. If you want to write well, you have to read a lot of good writing, preferably starting at a young age. But if all you're trying to write is legible work email, or cookie-cutter marketing copy, or whatever, an electronic nanny can probably get you across the finish line.
  • wcarey 6y ago
    Quite so. I suppose I lament the idea that you can become a good writer whilst shortcutting reading a large corpus of good literature. There are many ancillary benefits to reading good literature, and losing them makes education as formation that much harder. It's a much more important example of the phenomenon that children who are glued to phones or movies on long car trips instead of playing the license plate game are missing out on some implicit geographical education.