5 ms·

The 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

• FroshKiller 6y ago
  Your 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 ago
    There may have been a typo though, I think "with all its quirks" would be more correct.
    • FroshKiller 6y ago
      I 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 ago
    Thank 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.
    • ketzo 6y ago
      I wonder -- would you say that you write more formally than you speak (on average, context aside)? I'm always super curious about how someone's method of learning a second language impacts the way they use that language. My casual hypothesis is that what you read while learning impacted how you write, while what you listened to affected how you speak -- do you find that to be true?
      • lykahb 6y ago
        My writing is much more formal than speaking. If one writes much enough in a certain style, they get used to it. Same thing about speaking - politicians, actors, and other public figures have a certain effect on their everyday demeanor. Once I heard that writing and talking involve different areas of the brain.
• jsharf 6y ago
  My experience with Hemingway in the past has been that it's a set of general heuristics which prevent bad writing. I found it quite helpful to proofread. It's not a replacement for a human editor, but it's a step up from traditional autocorrect. At the end of the day, it is still up to the writer which suggestions they keep. Anyone who blindly accepts suggestions because the tool recommended them probably wasn't in the correct mindset to write well anyways.
  • semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    As others have pointed out, the application of such a tool for the prevention of bad writing will, at best, produce writing that is merely mediocre instead. One but hopes that the common reader of HN aspires to produce writing of a quality beyond the mediocre, unless she is usually assigned with the most trite and dreary of tasks.
    • Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
      Think of it as an attention getter. Rather than saying "you need to change this," it's a way to say "Make sure your usage of this construct is thoughtful and intentional instead of accidental." To that extent it seems like it could be useful in certain contexts.
• the_af 6y ago
  > Good writing is not an intrinsic property of the text - it is defined within a context of message and reader. Exactly. Hemingway himself wasn't a mechanical automaton blindly following his own rules. He broke them when it suited him. Style in writing isn't a process that can be applied in a mechanical fashion. Instead, _taste_ must be exercised.
• DenisM 6y ago
  And it's more than just context, it's also the intent. Naturally you may have different intent in different contexts, but it doesn't end there. For example one may chose to come across weak by using the passive voice, either to avoid responsibility, or to pay tribute to another person, or even to create a favorable background for a strong stance on a different subject. Passive voice itself is not a problem, lack of discretion is.
  • Kluny 6y ago
    Passive voice is actually essential sometimes - for instance when you're editing someone's work or reviewing their code. "X can be changed to y" comes across a lot softer than "you should change x to y", and is likely to get better results.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      What works even better is, “To avoid <problem>, consider Y instead of X”. Passive voice tries to mitigate the impact of the problem of “arbitrary direction” rather than resolving the problem.
  • gkya 6y ago
    Linguistics explores these phenomena from many directions, via it's subdisciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, semantics, and even syntax. A couple well known things the field mostly agrees: there are no real synonyms, in the sense that every word has its own semantic baggage, and that manifests different meanings in different contexts. So i.e. "use" and "utilise" are not at all the same words, one fancy. Same goes for syntactic structures. There's a variety of approaches here, but you'd be hard pressed to find even a supporter of transformational generative grammar, the Chomskyan paradigm who says active and passive sentences come from the same underlying deep structure (roughly speaking), who'd say active and passive voice sentences are equal or equivalent in discourse. Similarly, you can't boil down "complexity" to the length of sentences or number of clauses. I'd be more willing to concede if this was talking about the distance of things that refer to each other, or the number of words that refer to previous discourse or outer world (i.e. long-distance dependencies & deictic elements). But you can have paragraph long sentences that read just buttery smooth, and "sentence" itself is a pretty vague term that you can't really pin down. Like, if I splat that previous sentence into two around "and", would it really be two sentences, or is it really one sentence to begin with? All these weird stuff like "don't use active voice" or "use 'simpler' words" etc. are the product of the same mentality that in ye olde times wanted you not to split infinitives, not to end your sentences with prepositions, and other nonsense up with which you should not put.
• karaterobot 6y ago
  I've found Hemingway to be useful when writing business-related messages to team mates. I tend to get wordy and intricate when I dash off messages. What this app is good at is poking you and saying "can you make this sentence shorter? Can it be simpler?" Usually the answer is yes. It's a forcing function that deters lazy writing. It is not meant for writing beautiful, stylish prose. Or, at least, that's not what I'd ever consider using it for.
  • gen220 6y ago
    > It's a forcing function that deters lazy writing. I'm not a proselytizer for it, but this is one reason I appreciate codebases that enforce arbitrary per-line character limits. It pressures me to game the utility:noise ratio. Left to our own devices, we occasionally bang out 40-char variable names, of which 20 chars add no value to the reader. The color column on the screen is a nice coach, saying "c'mon, you can do better".
    • sjy 6y ago
      In Le ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter talks about how writing the book using 90s-era desktop publishing software allowed him to spot widows, orphans and other typographic ugliness as he was composing the text, and he would fix these by rewriting the text rather than adjusting the typography, which resulted in many improvements. I prefer writing in WYSIWYG editors for this reason – it’s good to have an external trigger that prompts you to try rephrasing, even if it’s effectively random.
• pkulak 6y ago
  There's a great saying that you have to know the rules before you can break them. Obviously a professional writer has no use for something like this... but I'm suggesting this to my young children for sure.
• edna314 6y ago
  Seems like one should write how the people who read your text would expect you to write. This is my main problem with writing, since I have a very hard time to figure out what people expect. I also read a lot of books about writing, but none really helped. They always use these very abstract concepts which if you apply them blindly will also lead to an incomprehensible text anyways. What helped a lot was to just take a similar text which seemingly fulfills expectations, and, almost short of plagiarism, just exchange the messages which are conveyed. This is where AI could help a lot, because I would think that it should be able to exactly this task, if you provide it the message you would like to write up. Anyways, I don’t know anybody (at least in science) who likes writing and I really hope that there will be a more practical solution than spending hours and hours of refining a text in the future. This time could better be spent on research.
  • petemir 6y ago
    Have you tried Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style"? Although there is indeed a chapter (ch.4) that deals with some difficult to apply concepts (i.e. adding unnecessary friction at the moment of writing), the other chapters delve into graspable topics with lots of examples that clearly explain what works and doesn't.
    • edna314 6y ago
      No, I haven’t read this one, maybe it’s worth a try. The issue is, even when you are at a stage where you realize what works and what doesn’t, you still wouldn’t know what to write exactly. The only option you have is to write up sentences, then check whether you made a mistake and, if so, write up a different sentence and reiterate. I would need a book which would tell me how to construct sentences which are in accordance with all the rules and concepts. But, it doesn’t seem to be possible to write such a book, since writing really is an art. After all, there also isn’t any book which teaches you how to paint like Da Vinci, but only those which tell you which rules you can apply to his paintings.