18 ms·
Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
Great for testing your copy
- bergie 13y agoAwesome! I think it would be great if editors could help users to not only format their contents, but also to write better. Another idea in sort of similar direction is doing automated link suggestions: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/automated-linking/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/automated-linking/
- pathdependent 13y agoI like this app. However, most of my work Latex based. If you had something like this for Sublime Text, I would buy it.
- serverascode 13y agoI think I would too. I like the idea. Not sure about calling it Hemingway, because I am a huge fan of the writer, but I would like to have something like this available for Sublime. It might have to deal with markdown.
- SyneRyder 13y agoAnother vote that I would like this within Sublime (although I'm not sure how that would work), and would really like for the tool to be able to interpret Markdown. Right now it gets confused by the markup for hyperlinks. Looks like a great tool for me to take rambling blog drafts and trip them down while editing/refining.
- buster 13y agoDoes lots of written work in restructed text and would buy as well (a sublime text addon, for example)!
- splitbrain 13y agoThe source of this would be useful to integrate such features in other apps (like editors). An API might do as well at least for online tools like blogs. As a standalone site it's too much hassle to integrate it into your daily workflow I think.
- natdempk 13y agoMaking this an API that WordPress, Draft, Ghost, and other writing platforms could pull in would be awesome. Maybe you could add plugin support or something for people that want it integrated into their blog/cms?
- ivan_ah 13y agoYou raise a good point: how should a "language linter" be integrated into the authoring workflow. I write mostly in plain text and have developed a bunch of command line writing scripts to check readability, passive voice usage, and naming conventions, but I'm not sure how I could share this with my less tech-saavy friends. Should the language tool be integrated into the editing interface or be an external service? Assuming an external service, how should it be integrated with CMSes (wordpress/dokuwiki)? Should the source, normalized plain text, or HTML be sent to the language service for checking? Where do the corrections/edits happen? As far as the business model is concerned, I'm not sure there is money to be made in this as a service to end users, but if this system is integrated as part of a complete workflow for edits/corrections some publishers and freelance editors might be willing to pay for this---not as the final check, but as a self-service "run this before you submit to me" requirement they give to authors to prune the low-hanging fruits.
- YPetrov 13y agoIt'd be interesting to paste a typical cover letter in the app and see how much crap one has to write nowadays to get to the interview stage. :)
- jawns 13y agoYou know what's fun? Pasting in text from Ernest Hemingway and seeing what he did wrong. But seriously, this is a nice, simple way to point out some general rules of thumb for improving writing, although I would love for it to be less proscriptive. Not every long sentence is a bad sentence, not every passive-voice sentence is a bad sentence, and not every adverb is a bad adverb. Oh, and by the way, the copy editor in me can't help but notice that an app that's intended to help you improve your writing tells you to "Aim for 2 or less" adverbs, rather than "Aim for 2 or fewer."
- midgetjones 13y agoI agree with your second paragraph, although this is following Hemingway's specific rules, so it's good to be strong with them. And of course, you have to know the rules before you can break them. Aside from Hemingway, it's fun to paste in other classic literature and see what the tool makes of it. It hated Lolita.
- mkrecny 13y agoI'd love there to be a proliferation of plugins for different writing styles. Hemmingway, Austin, Asimov, Wilde etc. Not so interested in "improving writing", more interested in achieving different aesthetics for different goals.
- aroman 13y agoI agree! The Hemingway mode at seems to be geared (ironically) at technical writing. My English teacher wouldn't like it — it encourages simplification of language and minimization of word variation. Sometimes it's good to write like Austin...
- mhurron 13y agoThat's what I noticed. It seemed to mark your writing higher the lower the reading grade level it was targeted at. I didn't realize that writing at a 5th grade level was the pinnacle of writing. What is with it's fear of adverbs?
- glibgil 13y agoWhen I edit, your app should give me a unique url that is chained to the original. I can't send someone a link to what I have edited. How did I do? Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors. If you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is dense and complicated. Your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic. Try editing that sentence to remove the red. Adverbs show in helpful blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead. You can use a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints. Phrases marked in green show a passive voice. Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button to compose something new.
- pistle 13y agoFor presenting utilize as a wasteful term, I want to tearfully hug everyone involved in this. Please kill 'utilize.' We should reach out to stakeholders and incentivize the sunsetting of the leveraging of the word 'utilize' from all slide decks. Slide decks - the (not) new version of the tri-fold foam presentation board. It's the clear binder of our age.
- sailfast 13y agoI have a methodology we can leverage to build a framework that will maximize the killing of 'utilize'. Ping me later to discuss.
- diydsp 13y agoUtilize has a rightful place in the English language. [1][2] Just because so many people misuse it, doesn't mean it should be ghettoized. Remember a few days ago when an article suggested that we may be shaping our lives according to the capability of machines and there were many naysayers? People nixing a perfectly useful word because a machine can easily recognize is a perfect example of us accomodating our ways to the capabilities of machines. [1] http://grammarpartyblog.com/2012/01/17/use-versus-utilize/ http://grammarpartyblog.com/2012/01/17/use-versus-utilize/ [2] http://writing.wikinut.com/Writing-Tip%3A-Use-and-Utilize-are-Not-the-Same/1c4q0-bs/ http://writing.wikinut.com/Writing-Tip%3A-Use-and-Utilize-ar...
- ivan_ah 13y ago> Utilize has a rightful place in the English language. [1][2] Neither of the these articles make a very strong point. Just because the Merriam-Webster felt this "use for unintended purpose" connotation doesn't mean it's true. I'm still of the opinion that "utilize" is completely useless---it is simply the French verb for "to use." The use of "utilize" in English is a classic "wanting to be fancy by using the French word" syndrome.
- sitkack 13y agoSo can I utilize the word utilize to appear sounding fancy?
- yock 13y agoI love it. One thing though, I don't want another text editor. This is a feature, not an app, and I want this to integrate into my existing workflow. I don't know if that is a web service for integration with popular editors, integration with things like Editorially, or something else, but I really don't want to open yet another app to edit things.
- BenjaminN 13y agoLove this!
- jaimebuelta 13y agoI like the idea of the app, but I'm not totally sure this kind of "review" will be very useful. The problem is that, in some cases, you need complex sentences , passive voice or adverbs. And that means that a perfectly fine article won't be pristine. I had a similar problem when facing syntax correctors that show a lot of warnings. Yes, they help you make less mistakes, but they also give falso positives, which can be distracting. I want to clean up and get to zero errors, after all. So, this can reduce your writing to be "too conformant". Man, writing is hard :_(
- chadwickthebold 13y agoI thought the same thing on first glance. However, maybe the use case for this is rather to filter entire blocks of solid color text. One complex (red) sentence every now and then is perfectly fine, but I would rather see a whole paragraph of them, say 4 or so in a row, as a problem.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoI just cannot stand having "errors" highlighted in red, so my tendency will be to feel bad for not correcting every one. It breaks my heart to see compiler warnings, even if I know that those specific ones are ok... Maybe is just me, but it will be conflicting for me, and potentially not useful...
- colig 13y agoI like it. Is the grade level calculated with Fleisch-Kincaid? $5 is a reasonable price (to me) for a minimal text editor with this feature, though I would prefer something meatier and more expensive along the likes of Scrivener.
- adam_b_long 13y agoWe use the Automated Readability Index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index
- lhnz 13y agoWell, this is great. But it's missing something. If I'm to learn how to write clearer, I will need to use this more often. Could they create an API and a chrome addon? Ubiquity is the killer feature of any communication tool.
- myth_drannon 13y agoI suspect they are using https://languagetool.org/ https://languagetool.org/ as a back-end, at least for some parts of the grading. LanguageTool has chrome addon and a public API.
- adam_b_long 13y agoWe're definitely planning on some form of Chrome add-on. That would be awesome. Thanks for using Hemingway!
- moron4hire 13y agoThere is nothing wrong with the passive voice.
- normloman 13y agoIt's not technically wrong, no. Nobody will accuse you of having bad grammar. But every good writing style manual warns against using it. Because the active voice is clear, bold, and more concise. There are only a few situations where writers should prefer the passive voice.
- rnprdk 13y agoMany "good writing style manual[s]" are kind of full of it. An interesting bit from the wiki(1) on passive voice: "For example, despite Orwell's advice to avoid the passive, his Politics and the English Language (1946) employs passive voice for about 20 percent of its constructions." As with anything, it's important to be aware of what you're doing. But back when I tutored people in writing, hard-and-fast rules like this resulted in awkward, contorted writing by scared students. For example, I once knew a very smart person who avoided predicate adjectives at all costs. I don't really blame him for confusing passive voice and predicate adjective. I even found cases where the Hemingway app confused the two. But it was too bad that he had been so thoroughly brainwashed against the passive. Though I kind of admired how he managed to avoid, for years of his life, what I think is an indispensable construction. 1 -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Advice_in_favor_of_the_passive_voice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Advice_in...
- normloman 13y agoI haven't had the experience of tutoring anyone in writing, but I'd like to. And I agree, that you can't place too much importance in style manuals ... they can give contradictory or just plain stupid advice. But good style manuals do more than set rules - they explain why the rules are there, and even highlight exceptions where breaking the rule is appropriate. They are indispensable for improvising your writing, provided you don't treat them like rulebooks. Read a few, then form your own opinion. Now, unlike a style manual, Hemingway doesn't explain the reasoning behind rules, or permit breaking the rules in the right context. It's limiting, and won't produce beautiful writing. But I suspect it will have use for non-writers. I'm talking about people who write imcomprehensibly, and don't have any incentive to master the art of writing. Doctors, lawyers, and business executives come to mind. In my experience, people in these careers write like shit and don't have time to improve their writing. By adhering to these rules, they can improve their writing significantly without much effort. The result will still be somewhat awkward and contorted, but far less than what they would write otherwise (marketspeak / legalese).
- aymeric 13y agoThis is great. I struggle with correcting my use of passive voice and I wish there were suggestions. For example, how would you rephrase this? "put some headphones on to reduce the odds of being interrupted by someone."
- tlarkworthy 13y agoput some headphones on to reduce (the risk of) interruptions by others.
- magicroundabout 13y agoer, "put some headphones on to reduce the odds of someone interrupting [you/him/her/null]."
- admiralpumpkin 13y agoheadphones reduce the odds of some interrupting you
- penguindev 13y agoWear headphones so you aren't interrupted. Wear headphones to reduce interruptions. IANAEM (not an english major) Actually, is your original even that bad? I though passive would be "Interruptions are reduced by you wearing headphones."
- cwaniak 13y agoNow what you need to do is to automate this process. User pastes the text and there is a magic auto-fix button that will shorten the sentences, make everything more readable, etc. And then charge per 24hrs the button is enabled.
- MichaelTieso 13y agoOhhh. Well done! Already sending this to a bunch of writers in my group. This would be killer as a WordPress plugin.
- preemrust 13y agoNicely done. It would be nice if they can licence the idea to the makers of other simple writing apps.
- Tycho 13y agoHemingway's writing is incredible, IMO. And the theoretical reasons he had for writing in that style are very convincing. However it leaves one massive problem. If this is the 'one true way' or writing fiction, so to speak, then nobody else can really embrace it because they'll be dismissed as Hemingway wannabes.
- jonnathanson 13y agoI'm going to love using this. I write for a living, so I write a maddening volume of output per week. While I don't absolve myself of the need to edit everything, I'm working against the law of large numbers. Some stupid errors, or bad stylistic habits, are going to slip through the net every week. I've been jonesing for a real-time style editor for years. Autocorrect is fine and dandy (and often wrong, but that's another story). But most autocorrect systems limit themselves to spelling and grammar. Hemingway selects for readability. That's very cool and very useful. That said, I'm probably not going to copy & paste everything I write into the Hemingway editing environment. I'd love plug-ins and APIs for Word, Google Docs, etc. If you make these, I will use them, and I will bug the living shit out of every writer I know to do the same.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sitkack 13y agoOne my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence. I have been mulling an NLTK powered editor for quite awhile now and this PoC is exciting. But I want to much more! * Measure for consistent voicing * Apply arbitrary-ish user supplied rules * Analyze grammar in sentence structure
- lutusp 13y ago> One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence. It would be nice to have a tool that detects such things, but for the moment, a detailed editing pass is a good idea. I always edit what I write, indeed most of the time I'm writing and editing in parallel. > But I want to much more! I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated methods will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's originator.
- sitkack 13y ago> I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated methods will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's originator. But for a lot of writing this is a good thing, having cohesive writing trumps losing the voice. It isn't fiction that I think these tools will be useful or desirable for, it is the mountains of technical writing we are drowning in. More troubling is the use of automated writing tools for propaganda and psyops.
- davidw 13y agoI tried it out on a few articles from PG and the Economist. It turns out complex sentences are common in their writing. I don't mind, or should I say that it is not minded?
- auganov 13y agoLove the concept. I'd pay monthly if it did more complex analysis. But not at this stage.
- kyleburton 13y agoThis is very cool. I'd pay $ (5ish) for a couple of other ways to use this: * a bookmarklet that allowed me to select text on my blog or on one of my github pages and analyze it * emacs integration * a command line tool that worked like ispell/aspell to help analyze things I've already written
- unhammer 13y agogrep this HN page for emacs and shell, lots of suggestions
- jhonovich 13y agoI found this quite useful. I could see myself using it regularly as a Chrome extension similarly to how I use grammarly lite currently.
- acqq 13y agoI believe the logic behind HemingwayApp is misguided: Hemingway the writer actually wrote long sentences and they were actually important in his writing. Passive is also important in good writing. You can't use machine metrics to force "good writing" you can only enforce mediocrity and the following some random rules "because the rules have to be followed." Likewise, I as a writer of the software would absolutely hate to run some program to tell me "this function has more than 10 lines" or whatever. If I wrote 500 lines function it doesn't mean it shouldn't be that long: there are examples where exactly such functions are still necessary and good. Such automatic evaluations are for managers who probably don't understand what they enforce. Pointy-haired bosses, if you will. So I see HemingwayApp as the pointy-haired-editor app. (Edit: Improving the text based on the human input, thanks Agathos!)
- altcognito 13y agoBut most people are lazy and will slip into writing poorly on a regular basis. Having an automated tool highlight potential problem spots can help you to write more consistently the way YOU want to write. If what is desired is passive voice then ignore the highlighted messaging. note: most programming syntax style applications have the ability to selectively highlight special cases to flag sections of code to ignore particular errors.
- DigitalJack 13y agoYour comment about machine metrics reminded me of corporate use of process.
- onion2k 13y agoYou might not be able to force people to write well, but you can help them not write badly. That's the point of apps like this one - mediocre is better than bad. Once someone has improved their writing to the point where this app is no longer useful they can easily switch to something else. Writing is a skill that few people have really learnt to do well. For them, following some "random rules" will improve what they write. Regarding writing 500 line functions in code: very occasionally you need that, but there's nothing wrong with an IDE that points it out and asks if it's really a good idea, and for new developers who would do that sort of thing all the damn time it'd be very useful in improving what they come up with. Learn the rules first, then learn when they don't apply.
- hluska 13y agoI like products like this, though English is a notorious pain in the ass to try and write, so I thought I'd try it out. In good news, this app does a good job of handling complex sequences. Consider the sentence: The quick, brown fox ran out of the clump of trees, saw us, got scared, and promptly ran back into hiding. When I typed that, I expected it to turn red, but it didn't. Great job! However, there is a problem with identifying adverbs. Consider the sentence, "He is a burly man." In this case, though burly ends with -ly (like adverbs), it is an adjective.
- k-mcgrady 13y agoI like this. I pasted in some text from a blog post I'm working on. All the edits it suggested made the post much better. I was worried that through the suggestions it might take the personality out of a persons writing, but because not all the suggestions are explicit (e..g change this word to this word) that might be avoided.
- nomadcoop 13y agoI would love an API to this so I can integrate it into Storytella, the writing app I'm working on.
- happy4crazy 13y agoIf you'd like to read a deep investigation into writing styles, let me suggest Clear and Simple as the Truth[0]. Steven Pinker discusses the book in a fun talk on communicating science[1]. [0] http://classicprose.com/ http://classicprose.com/ [1] http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technology-in-the-21st-century-steven-pinker-12644/ http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technol...
- agentultra 13y agoFor the hackers, I use write-good-mode in emacs to catch passive voice (which is based on some simple shell scripts[0]). I've heard good things about diction-mode, grammar-mode and artbollocks-mode. And of course flyspell. I find emacs very pleasing for writing text. I also use org-mode and it's LaTeX exporter extensively for publishing. Now if only it could integrate with text-fields in my browser... [0] http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...
- Flenser 13y agoI use org-mode for a to-do list and reference/archive. How can it help with publishing?
- agentultra 13y agoI've been thinking about putting together a blog post explaining how I use it for my book projects... however the short of it is: org-export. I can map out my book chapters and sections in a typical tree. I use :noexport: for sub-trees in which I keep notes and errata. Since I use LaTeX I can give my documents some more direct formatting control using #+BEGIN_LATEX blocks (which I have found useful for adding a title page, controlling flow positioning of tables, etc). And I've written a little elisp to hook in some functions which run the texi2pdf program on my exported output automatically. The nice thing is that I don't have to worry about typesetting until much later. I can just focus on the text, structure and flow. I can have my notes inline. It's really quite a nice setup.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoPlease do write this post. There's not enough examples of working setups for publishing with org mode; your experience will be helpful to many (myself included).
- Kumquat 13y agoPlease make one for ee cummings now.
- normloman 13y agoone for make ee cummings, now please
- datashaman 13y agouse d punc tu a tion f a i l
- Blahah 13y agoNeat. Along the same lines for emacs people, there's writemode-good (https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode), and for Sublime Text there's Writing Style (https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Writing%20Style https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Writing%20Style). Also, heads up that the site layout is not responsive: viewing at ~800px width places buttons all over the left side of the screen in an ugly way.
- Houshalter 13y agoPasting "best" HN comments in I get: Grade 10, Grade 6, Grade 11, Grade 14, Grade 14, And copy and pasting the whole page gets me Grade 9 (and some serious bugs (http://i.imgur.com/U6sK1mM.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/U6sK1mM.png?1) which I think may have crashed my browser.) "New" HN comments: Grade 12, Grade 7, Grade 7, Grade 5, Grade 7, And the whole page is Grade 8 My own comments apparently have a lot of unreadable sentences but they aren't that bad. (this comment is Grade 3! Yay.)
- mpeg 13y agoI'd definitely pay for a Chrome addon or desktop version of this.
- aresant 13y agoSeveral years ago at conversion voodoo we studied the impact on conversion of writing at an 8th grade reading level which is about the average American. It, of course, improved conversion and it turns out there is already quite a bit of algorithmic work on the topic to help tune your ad copy. So I am a believer in the hypothesis that simplicity and clarity, in marketing anyways, is a worthwhile pursuit. I am going to test this Hemingway along the same lines - take some longer form copy, run it through and test output. (1) http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increasing-site-conversion-by-writing-for-an-8th-grade-reading-level/ http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increasing-site...
- FeinKrepp 13y agoMelikes
- wsinks 13y agoAnother question - do we know who made this app? I'm curious as to the security of their servers.
- hafabnew 13y agoNeat! From their JS: readinglvl = getReadingLevel(paragraphs, sentences, words, chars); [..] function getReadingLevel (p, s, w, c) { var r = Math.round((4.75 * (c / w)) + (0.5 * (w / s)) - 21.43); return r; } So it's a slightly modified http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index (uses 4.75 instead of 4.71 .
- adam_b_long 13y agoThat's right. We're using ARI, mainly because it's a much simpler algorithm since it doesn't require identifying syllables. As you can see in the code, my programming skills are pretty weak, so ARI was an easy choice. This was my first non-trivial programming effort (I'm a marketer/product manager, not an engineer).
- hafabnew 13y agoWas not meaning my comment as a slight to you at all, it's a very cool app you've got here. Best of luck with it!
- vkb 13y agoThis is a very beautiful and logical interface, but it's the wrong approach, because it's a very developer-centric approach to writing. The problem with writing is you can't loop through it and find whether each sentence passes or throws an exception. A written work needs to be evaluated as a cohesive whole. That's what "bold and clear" writing means to me: a written piece of work that stands on its own and says what it means. Computers are not smart enough yet to understand why "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." is a complete, perfect paragraph. It doesn't have a verb and it looks like Lola is misspelled multiple times, so it doesn't pass the subset of grammar rules set up in the backend. But the meaning, the essence of the paragraph is clear. Writing may someday be able to be governed by algorithms, but not yet. I ran the second paragraph of David Copperfield through Hemingway [1], and it gave me too many adverbs, a misspelling of the British neighbourhood, and the use of passive voice. This is understandable, as Charles Dickens was a verbose writer who got paid by the word. And yet, it doesn't detract from the fact that he is one of the most-loved in the English cannon. We can't measure good literature yet, because there is no straightforward formula, and although this is an interesting attempt, it can't teach good writing better than a human. For a better, and still technical, approach to understanding how and why sentences and paragraphs work with us or against us, it's better to read Strunk and White, and even better to read "How Fiction Works" by James Wood. If there is a way to incorporate at least those two books into conditional statements, I would be excited to see it. [1] http://imgur.com/k9hsHfj http://imgur.com/k9hsHfj
- syllogism 13y ago> Computers are not smart enough yet to understand why "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." is a complete, perfect paragraph. It doesn't have a verb and it looks like Lola is misspelled multiple times, so it doesn't pass the subset of grammar rules set up in the backend. But the meaning, the essence of the paragraph is clear. Eh, this isn't so infeasible. Any wide-coverage, statistical grammar will have a TOP --> NP production, as well as the usual TOP --> S. i.e. the grammar must accept NP-only sentences; they're too common to reject as mistakes. I think it's reasonable to have a linter that throws a warning for that sort of sentence though. By all means dismiss them. But it can help you catch things you didn't intend.
- valvoja 13y agoI like the app and I think the easy to remember name suits it well, even if Hemingway might turn in his grave. It's a promising start, but I'm not sure if I'd continue to use it unless I could start tracking improvements in my writing. I would love to see a bit more of the hard data behind the rankings. For example, I just tested a blog article I wrote 5 minutes ago against an article written by a proper journo on PandoDaily and I scored higher. Does that make me a better writer? I hope not. In all seriousness, the idea has a lot of potential and you could certainly find a few nice ways to compare yourself different writing styles of famous authors Hemingway or someone else.
- enemtin 13y agoDear whoever made Hemingway: Can you please make a Wordpress plugin? I would love you forever. Yours in gratitude,
- captainchaos 13y agoThis is really nice. I said I'd by $5 for a desktop version but I'd pay $10 for a Chrome extension that could work on selected text or (even better) the Gmail compose text box.
- magicroundabout 13y agoIt seems pretty useful as a tool for spotting the kind of linguistic howlers that tumble out on first draft. I can see this sort of thing becoming more valuable when more advanced Natural Language Programming APIs become available. It would be cool to see an attempt to encode Orwell's rules from Politics and the English language: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) I find it quite surprising that detection of cliches and needless multiple-negatives are not common features of word processing software.
- dllthomas 13y agohttp://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
- aneisf 13y agoI'm reminded of a story[1] I heard on NPR the other day. Researchers have drawn correlations between writing style and the eventual onset of Alzheimer's. Apparently nuns who had a habit of writing verbose, idea-dense sentences were less likely to develop Alzheimer's later on. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1272118...
- normloman 13y agoProfessional writer here. Writing well takes years of practice. If you already write well, you won't need this program. You'll know the rules and the right times to break them. But if you can't put in the time and effort to become a great writer, just using this program can improve your writing a lot.
- krmmalik 13y agoGlad to see the opinion of an actual professional writer rather than just someone with an opinion for the sake of it. I'm trying very hard to improve my writing at the moment and reading Zinsser's book. I understand what Zinsser is encouraging us all to do, but putting it in practise is over 30 years of un-learning that I need to do so it's not easy. I'm glad that you said the tool is useful because i was having doubts about it after seeing the other comments. Im going to use it to assess my next blog post and see how things pan out. Thanks for the tip.
- normloman 13y agoThat's a classic book!
- e12e 13y agoEasily the best book on writing I've read. Closely followed by some research from the 60s on "process oriented writing" (I'm not sure if that's the accepted English term -- the material I read was in Danish). They essentially say the same thing: writing is re-writing -- and in that light, any tool that encourages you to look at what you've written again, and rethink it one more time, should help improve your writing. [edit: Hemmingway himself has allegedly said "The first draft of anything is shit." -- but at least wikiquote has it as unsourced, so I'm not sure if the attribution is correct -- even if the idea probably is]
- kibibu 13y agoCan I ask which book in particular?
- rodolphoarruda 13y agoI'm using this tool to review the English versions of my resumés. It's been a very interesting experience so far.
- the_unknown 13y agoThis is quite the fun tool. I know web apps are all the rage but really would love to see this implemented as an MS Word plugin - I'd be far more likely to use it on an ongoing basis if it were integrated directly into my editor of choice.
- buzzcut 13y agoThis is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers to help them avoid flabby, purple writing. But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over the other or vary them for effect. You might be concerned about rhythm, or you might be attempting to establish a certain tone, distance, closeness, formality, or lack of. We have this weird cultural obsession with the clarity, brevity, and simpleness of writing. Jacques Barzun even wrote a writing manual called Simple and Direct, as if these are the only virtues to be found in writing. But I think you want as many tools as possible to achieve the effects you want. There is a huge rich tradition here, that we've largely lost, a tradition that teaches about hypotactic and paratactic sentences, that teaches about periodic and loose sentences, that teaches how to make left and right branching sentences, that teaches subordination, that teaches rhetorical devices, and that advocates (at times) longer, more complex sentences for richer and denser writing. Thankfully there are a number of books out (some of them) recently that seem to be fighting back against the austerity view of writing. They include, if you're interested: - Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences - Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence - Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, Syntax as Style - Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose I'd just add, there is nothing wrong with being simple and clear. There is nothing wrong with cutting out needless or weak adverbs. But there is something wrong with worshiping the austerity style as, at all times, the best and the only way to go. There are lots and lots of reasons and occasions to deviate from it, but the style orthodoxy these days is the one assumed by that (admittedly cool) website.
- bo1024 13y agoI thought it was ironic that the first two sentences were very well-written, but highlighted. As if to show an example where the app would be useful. The sentences are excellent and don't need changing.
- mjhea0 13y agolove this. contact me if you're interested in adding this to a markdown app. :) michael [at] mherman [dot] org
- OoTheNigerian 13y agoBrilliant! I am wondering if it may be better and/or more profitable to license the Hemingway algorithm to be used in the dozens of writing applications via a Chrome/browser app initially I would suppose (starting with Google Docs up to Poetica, Penflip, Draft etc.) The value proposition I assume is the suggestions and recommendation. Focusing on that instead of customer acquisition/user interface design for another writing app may be more rewarding. Great job all the same.
- higherpurpose 13y agoCan we see this as a Wordpress plugin, too? Or a Chrome extension for Wordpress (the way Grammar.ly works for example).
- wpietri 13y agoNeat! I just pasted in a chapter from a book I may or may not be writing. It's a useful experience. It definitely pointed out some things that could be better. However, it's wrong a lot of the time. I'd encourage you to add a little explanatory note for people less confident in their writing. Something about how no computer is a substitute, they should make the final decisions, etc. It'd also be great to have a feature where I could bless particular sentences. Good editors make useful suggestions, but they also know to let marginal things go if the author disagrees. Also, two minor bugs: any paragraph after multiple blank lines gets entirely highlighted in red. And you shouldn't capture the control-tab keystroke and convert it into a tab character. Every time I try to leave that window, I end up mangling my text.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cell303 13y agoThis is great for writing scientific articles, manuals, tutorials, text books and the like. I'll start using it right now :) However, as far as literature is concerned, I'd not be using it. The title is misleading in that respect. Something along the lines "simple", "clean", "focused" writing would be better. BTW: I have to paste some page-sized sentences from Thomas Pynchon in there.
- Wistar 13y agoI like and use Writer's Diet which seems quite similar and has been around for a few years. http://writersdiet.com/WT.php http://writersdiet.com/WT.php
- Duhck 13y agoI love this, and I love your test for the desktop version. One suggestion, make the price a slider from $0->$100 and instead of asking "Would you pay $5 for a desktop version of Hemingway? It would add the ability to save and open text files." ask "Please suggest a price for the desktop version" This will give you a better idea of the true value of the application to people without being suggestive. Awesome idea and implementation!
- jaysonelliot 13y agoAlso a big fan of the "desktop version" test, because it is triggered by the action of a user trying to get the desktop version as opposed to thinking they are about to answer a poll. To that end, I wouldn't trust the data you would get if you asked people to state what they would be willing to pay. Self-reported data out of context is notoriously unreliable. Instead, really put it to the test. Tell people that you'll develop a desktop version if enough pledges are received, and ask people to make a binding pledge in advance. Give them a discount for jumping in early, of course, but use the average pledge as a guideline for final pricing. If the median pledge amount is, say, $10, then you could probably assume that people would be willing to pay $15 once the product was actually available for download. (Those are made-up numbers, but you get the idea.)
- kelmop 13y agoNice! I love good quality code: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup-obf.js http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup-obf.js
- kelmop 13y agoSeriously, what obfuscator is used here?
- vini 13y agothis one http://javascriptobfuscator.com http://javascriptobfuscator.com
- halfdan 13y agoI especially like how easy you can guess the non-obfuscated version: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup.js http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup.js
- sanj 13y agoI wonder if this could help with comments: http://xkcd.com/481/ http://xkcd.com/481/
- usrusr 13y agoIsn't http://xkcd.com/1133/ http://xkcd.com/1133/ a lot more relevant to hemingwayapp?
- nswanberg 13y agoPaul Graham's writing seems simple and direct to me, so I wondered how the website would treat one of his essays. Here are the suggestions from the third paragraph of http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html: "The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively (only) about English literature. (Sentence hard to read) Certainly (Adverb) schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes (Forms, makes up) a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. (Sentence very hard to read). This is given a "readability" score of grade 14, which I suppose means it can only be deciphered by college sophomores or above. I wondered how it would read after being rewritten to achieve a perfect score in the site, so I took a stab at it: "In school students write essays about English literature. But real essays can be about many more things. Schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. All over the country students are not writing about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees. They are not writing about the role of color in fashion. They are not writing about what makes a good dessert. They are writing about symbolism in Dickens." The result brings me straight back to my days of taking standardized tests, where the test had a snippet of some essay, and was followed by questions on the topic. There was information in those snippets, but very little tone. It could be a bad attempt at my part, but while the information remains in my version, the tone is gone--I can no longer smell the air of Cambridge in that writing.
- JasonFruit 13y agoI don't think Hemingway could breathe at Cambridge.
- nswanberg 13y agoThe real Hemingway or the website? I was hoping someone would explore the idea this tool could remove elitism, since I haven't made up my mind on that (I think Paul's version is much more pleasant to read). I guess this is a start. Thinking along those lines, has anyone put Jeff Atwood's writing into this thing? He's an extremely effective communicator to large tech audiences, and my guess is that he should have a more readable score on this thing than Paul would.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoThanks for posting this! I've been struggling to write my first novel, and I'm interested to see how I score with this. Of course, when you're writing, many times you break the rules. At times grammatically incorrect dialog, for instance, scans better. You might leave a subject off a sentence, make the reader hunt around for it. You might make some sentences difficult in order to contrast them with freely-flowing sentences in the space afterwards. You might create long, difficult-to-read sentences punctuated with short declarative ones. Wonder how this tool is going to know any of that?
- adam_b_long 13y agoYou're right that short, declarative sentences aren't always better. But, our goal in building this tool was to just provide a few simple algorithms for catching things that you might miss after staring at a piece of writing for too long.
- Udo 13y agoIt's a tool explicitly designed for the dumbing-down of text. It might have its uses, for instance when you're writing ad copy, but applying it to everything you write would be a mistake.
- adam_b_long 13y agoHey guys, my name is Adam Long and my brother and I created Hemingway a few months ago! Loving the comments here. As many of you pointed out, rules are meant to be broken. Our goal was to fix a simple problem: when you're looking at your own writing for too long, you start missing the simple, obvious errors. You can follow me on Twitter @Adam_B_Long if you're interested in chatting about Hemingway with me.
- Perceval 13y agoIf you want to be even more advanced in your Hemingway analysis of text, you will want to have a feature that highlights long Latinate-root words and suggests short Germanic-root synonyms as replacements.
- jimejim 13y agoCool. I was in the early stages of doing a userscript for gmail to do something like what you have here. All it does right now is filter out specific words/phrases I know I use too much, but I found some scripts that check for passive voice and "weasel words" that I want to incorporate. This is definitely cool. You may want to check this out, if you haven't seen it already: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...
- ahussain 13y agoI pasted in some David Foster Wallace text and it exploded.
- moondowner 13y agoIf you make a desktop version (that works offline as well), I'm totally buying it.
- imranq 13y agoThis is great, I can definitely see myself using this for long texts. What about having modes for different historical authors: Austin, Dostoevsky, Woolf. Who said that Hemingway was the golden standard? Although I have to admit Hemingway's famous short short story (though possibly not his) gives me chills "for sale, baby shoes, never worn"
- gruseom 13y agoThat wasn't Hemingway. The first recognizable version was by William R. Kane. Never heard of William R. Kane? Me neither; hence the Hemingway. Quotes always bond to the nearest plausible famous person. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/
- taternuts 13y agoThis seems pretty cool - though the display could use some work (I don't know if this is just me, on Chrome). It's overlapping in a lot of places, the buttons seem a bit wonky, and the spacing is weird (http://i.imgur.com/bNqI9MD.png http://i.imgur.com/bNqI9MD.png)
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoThis should be a plugin that replaces the standard spelling/grammar checker in word processing software.
- Camillo 13y agoI thought it was a problem that 50%* of college freshmen read below a 10th grade level, but apparently the problem was with college graduates writing above it. (*: number made up because I can't be bothered to look it up.)
- bhartzer 13y agoWow, this is great. I now have a tool to put all my writing through before I finish an article. Very cool.
- mmaunder 13y agoYES!!!! As someone who loves writing but wasn't an english major, this rocks!!! Thank you.
- ARothfusz 13y agoSeems like a good tool to help with documentation, where long complex sentences can lead readers astray, and passive voice hides important information.
- dllthomas 13y agoIn addition to the unfair maligning of the passive, I note that the following (simplified from a line in http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922) is not marked as passive despite being so: "This example will go unidentified as passive if you trust bad grammar-checking programs." The problem is never the passive per se - it's unclear writing, period. Sometimes that involves passive voice.
- gregf 13y agoI would love to have something like this as a vim plugin.
- CalRobert 13y agoThis saddens me. I appreciate clear writing as much as anyone, but are we not denuding our language if we attempt to describe everything using short sentences and a small lexicon? I hate reading James Fenimore Cooper as much as the next person (including, notably, Twain), but surely there is a place for complex ideas expressed with a rich vocabulary and nuanced structure.
- CalRobert 13y agoAnd no adverbs?!???? That's just ludicrous. I modified an adjective with one right there. I regret nothing!
- anExcitedBeast 13y agoTo be fair, "just" rarely adds any value. "That's just ludicrous." vs "That's ludicrous." Reads pretty much the same.
- CalRobert 13y agoAh, but I had more fun writing it that way!
- dfc 13y agoMy English teachers would have started with eliminating the contractions and then discuss "just."
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoI can't work out whether or not you're being ironic, but by the same token, "To be fair" and "pretty" are needless filler too. (In case it's not clear, I disagree with your premise!)
- throwaway344 13y agoI feel this would be more interesting as a bookmarkelet to parse web pages. Like the Simple English Wikipedia but everywhere on every page.
- heraclitus23 13y agoAny famous writer's style should stand for a "filter" that anyone can apply to a text. I'm waiting for the Instagram for text editors.
- aytekin 13y agoOne of the best product names I have seen in a long time! - People who are interested in being a (good) writer get excited when they hear the name. The name suggests they might write well like Hemingway. - The name is already familiar and impossible to forget. - It creates a lot of controversy and discussion as seen in this thread!
- Fasebook 13y agoYes, I would $20+ dollars for a desktop version, that didn't suck at what this is supposed to be doing.
- imdsm 13y agoFound a bug: type in "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" and watch the highlighting break.
- DanBC 13y agoPlease edit this to include a line break, or include 4 spaces at the front of the line. You've fucked page layout for mobile users.
- rnprdk 13y agoA fun contrast to this would be kottke.org's "Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace" from a while back: http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-wallace http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-... Also: I haven't read a whole lot of Hemingway, but when I did read him, I always thought he was much more versatile a writer than made out to be.
- lutusp 13y ago> I haven't read a whole lot of Hemingway, but when I did read him, I always thought he was much more versatile a writer than made out to be. Remember that Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and many other writers began as newspaper reporters, where over time they learned to express complex stories with the fewest words.
- RogerL 13y agoI think the concept people are reaching for is the idea of false positives and negatives. Yes, if you have a bad sentence there is a good chance it will highlight it. But, perhaps not (false positive). Similarly, it will flag many perfectly fine sentences not pitched to 7 graders (false negatives). Here is text I more or less randomly chose from MOMA's site. Almost all of it is graded as "very hard to read". Where is the cutting edge of the motion picture? Discover it first at MoMA. Building upon the Museum's long tradition of exploring cinematic experimentation, Modern Mondays is a showcase for innovation on screen. Engage with contemporary filmmakers and moving image artists, and rediscover landmark works that changed the way we experience film and media. Any edit I make to that paragraph that makes the app happy seems to diminish the text. In contrast, my first paragraph is graded better than the MOMA text, yet I think it is worse. The one thing it did complain about were the adverbs 'similarly' and 'perfectly'. The former is required to draw the comparison; the second is perhaps redundant, but I am emphasizing to make a point - redundancy is as much a tool in writing as it is a crutch or error. I'm not saying the app is useless, just take the output with a huge grain of salt. Heck, if I paste text from Hemingway it is a sea of red and yellow.
- sehugg 13y agoForgive me if I'm being dense, but are there any feature differences from the grammar checkers available in word processors since the 90s? (besides being on the web, I mean)
- philmcc 13y agoMy advice: on the "would you pay $5 for a desktop version", after the yes, offer to save their email for when it's ready. I probably (adverb) would've given it to you. I'm not sure that I'll remember to come back and look for it.
- munificent 13y agoI think people are reading a bit too much into the name, and into the feedback the app gives. I don't think it's "get rid of all the pastels and your writing will be like Heminway's", nor do I even think "get rid of all the warnings" is what it's trying to do. It is useful for a writer to throw some text at it and see what you can learn. More feedback is almost always better for writers. The trick, is always, is having the judgement to incorporate intelligently. For example, I stumbled onto a book about procedural content generation in games[1]. As a writer, game programmer, and dedicated fan of roguelikes, if this book were any farther up my alley, it would be banging against the back fence. But, ugh, when I tried to read it, I just gave up after a few paragraphs. It's not gibberish, but it's almost physically painful to wring the actual information out of it. And, indeed, when I throw some of those paragraphs at this app, I see: Paragraphs: 1 Sentences: 31 Words: 833 Characters: 4196 11 of 31 sentences are hard to read. 11 of 31 sentences are very hard to read. 10 adverbs. Aim for 0 or less. 10 words or phrases can be simpler. 13 uses of passive voice. Aim for 6 or less. If the authors took a bit of advice from this app, they'd end up with a better book. That sounds like a win to me. [1]: http://pcgbook.com/ http://pcgbook.com/
- whatsreal 13y agoI would venture that the problem with pcgbook.com is not the quality of writing, but the fact that most of the authors are not native english speakers. They seem to be mostly Dutch or at least living in Copenhagen.
- munificent 13y agoEither way, the problem is the quality of the writing. It just may be that the cause of that is the authors not being native English speakers. :) (The fact that they're adopting an academic tone doesn't help either, for that matter.)
- tormeh 13y agoAhahaha! How many textbooks have you read? How many American ones? The majority of them suck. Wikipedia can usually be counted upon to be clearer. And the more academic the books are, the more they suck. Actually, I would guess that how often the words "I", "you" and other personal pronouns referring to the author and reader appear in a book would be a powerful positive predictor of the book's quality. Sure, being non-native doesn't help, but the world of academic writing has far, FAR bigger problems than that.
- baddox 13y agoThe funny thing is, I found the yellow and red sentences in their description to be sufficiently bold and clear.
- seancoleman 13y agoI'm tempted to reply to long, low signal/noise ratio emails with this.
- gtirloni 13y agoLooks interesting. As an wannabe writer, I was checking the AP Stylebook but the price is prohibitive right now. http://www.apstylebook.com/ http://www.apstylebook.com/
- gaussdiditfirst 13y agoGreat idea, I can think of many ways this sort of app could be extended to improve sentence structure via a number of other heuristics you might find mentioned in a grammar book.
- rbonvall 13y agoApparently the sentence "my telly is red" has an adverb and uses passive voice :P
- BHSPitMonkey 13y agoYou should add a warning class for possible misspellings, too. It would be nice to not need to use a separate spell checker.
- mbillie1 13y ago"Why do we drive on the parkway, but fetishize an impossible and ridiculous masculinity on the Hemingway?"
- km3k 13y agoI'd love to see this as a firefox extension.
- cdonnellytx 13y agoInterestingly it marks the infamous Zero Wing intro as grade 3 or 4, but considers the "correct" translation to be Grade 6 and complains about the "all of" they use. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zero_Wing http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zero_Wing EDIT: Forgot HN isn't Markdown.
- adregan 13y agoWho will make the Faulkner? It highlights your sentence red if it doesn't go for at least a page and a half.
- squirejons 13y agoThe coder opened his IDE. The IDE was on the screen of his monitor. The IDE was colorful in the dimly lit room. The coder opened his can of Red Bull. He drank once from it and put it down. Then he placed his fingers on the keyboard and began coding. It was PHP code, and it was good. He typed into the night and early morning. He got up and went to bed. He felt good. He did not think about the woman that night because he was tired. That was good, too.
- cjg 13y agoI think very few people would actually like using a desktop version, because it breaks your workflow. Anyone who is prepared to hand over money for something like this ideally wants it integrated into their current writing environment, be that Word, LibreOffice, Scrivener, Dark Room or whatever. Plugins are the way to commercialise this (if that's at all possible).
- Mz 13y agoI have a question about the app itself: I grew up in a bilingual home. My mom is a German immigrant who spoke no English when she met my American father. So in spite of having a good education and getting high praise for the content I produce, I find that I often write in "Germish." I need help with spelling, punctuation and grammar. The technical aspect of my writing is shockingly only fair to middlin' at best, sigh. Spelling help is not hard to find but punctuation and grammar help is hard to find. So how helpful is it with that stuff? Because it looks like it focuses on tone or something, not basic grammar per se? Thanks.
- kriro 13y agoI wonder if you could get a negative score by pasting some translated Kant :P Pretty cool, might use it as a quick checkup tool, would pay the 5$. Any word on what happens to the pasted text? I can't find any terms of use. Could be really useful if you could change the rating rules. I'd like to adapt it to academic texts for example. There's some use beyond style as well since you could automatically check for superlatives (or adjectives in general) and the like that are generally not wanted and some other typical constructs that should be avoided.
- zsiciarz 13y agoI wish for a H.P. Lovecraft app like that.
- im3w1l 13y agoBug report: If I mark the text in the textbox and drag and drop it in the box, the dragged text is displayed on top of the text already there. It looks very bad.
- christiangenco 13y agoI'm in love with this. I wish it was a plugin for Ghost[1]. 1. https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- maknz 13y agoPublic API, please!
- dataking 13y agoVery cool! I wish it would come with an API to integrate into text editors (Sublime Text, Emacs, Vim, etc.) Shameless plug: Some time ago I authored a Sublime Text (2/3) plug-in that highlights use of passive voice and "weazel words" (i.e., words to use sparingly and words). To install from Package Control, just search for "Writing Style" :)
- hoggle 13y agoI often really like long sentences, also when reading. This constant trend towards conformance is one of the more annoying trends of our times.
- beloch 13y agoI'd love this as a plugin for emacs or notepad++.
- I_am_Doge 13y agowow so app such writing better than mcirosoft word
- taternuts 13y agoHN is the last place that needs novelty accounts
- andralamoosia 13y agoThis is an interesting idea, and kudos to the founders for the start, enmity to passive voice notwithstanding. Good writing is hard. Things that help are welcome. And good for them for trying. It does seem a bit rough, still, though . . . I wrote a book chapter recently -- as a last minute favor for a friend, and gratis. I did my best to make the words sing -- the subject's a yawner for most people, and I had to entertain myself while writing the thing. In addition to sly references to whatever caught my fancy that day, I quite deliberately used contractions all through. More music in 'em I reckoned and they scanned better. Some genius editor sent a markup back all de-contracted and I had to spend a day adding them back in. Cursing. It is really, really hard to write well precisely because so much depends on context. It's true in professional writing too -- you have to keep your audience in mind. True that adjectives are less persuasive, usually, than facts stated slyly, but see how those sibilants sounds aloud? Maybe it's my taste and not yours, but maybe that's the point of a hemmingwayapp -- you could always joyceify it or send it throughout iambify.com and set it to my wild irish rose. I'm sure Stanislaw Lem's great piece the Electronic Bard has been posted in the past but for those who don't know it and want the last word on wordsmithing machina, check it -- goo.gl/zZD0pX . Warning -- don't read this while drinking anything or you will risk snorting soda pop out your nose.
- piyush_soni 13y agoThat's good and helpful, but I don't know why it would suggest me to replace "All of" to "All" in this simple sentence below: "All of you please stand up. " Any answers by English experts?
- ScottBurson 13y agoI agree, that's a strange suggestion. Clearly this program cannot be trusted absolutely.
- randomflavor 13y agoCan I plug this into gmail?
- Trindaz 13y agoThis might help bloggers write copy, but it's definitely not good for writers. The first paragraph of Chapter 1 of Robert Hughes' Shock of the New has these stats according to Hemingway: 5 of 12 sentences are hard to read. 2 of 12 sentences are very hard to read. 2 adverbs (he should be aiming for "0 or less"). 0 words or phrases could be simpler* *this "could be simpler" feature might be a bit ambitious. If you're confident in telling me that the entire text is essentially too complicated, it seems contradictory that at the same time none of it could be made more simple.
- im3w1l 13y agoI made a small greasemonkey script for google drive integration :). It adds a button to the documents toolbar. http://pastebin.com/cw1hHcC5 http://pastebin.com/cw1hHcC5
- melipone 13y agoIt does not work for technical papers but if I am struggling with forming a sentence, I'll certainly keep it in mind.
- bobzimuta 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7224386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7224386 I'd like to propose the bobzimuta constant: The first 40% of any HN comments on a page can be skipped since they will likely only be pedantic circle-jerking.
- csense 13y agoI hated Hemingway in high school. His writing style is really mediocre. When reading A Farewell to Arms, if it wasn't for the fact that it was a professionally published and bound book, I would have thought it was an amateur attempt at fiction writing from one of my high school classmates -- and one of the weaker writers at that. I couldn't stomach his writing style for an entire novel, so I ended up not finishing the book. I would like to see someone make a similar website to guide you toward writing in the style of Charles Dickens.
- tlack 13y agoWhat a great and simple idea. Make it an API, please, and don't forget the history function so I can see how text evolves over time.
- stevewilhelm 13y agoWould pay $5 for a Sublime Text Plug-in version.
- vipworld 13y agoTop scores in readability with these dramatic, bold, and above all, clear adjustments: "Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. Hemingway shits on your long sentences. Fuck complexity. Smack an adverb with blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead. You can insert a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints. The passive voice sucks."
- dasmithii 13y agoThis could be the future of stylistic education in literature. If a tool existed to generate rules for this editor to follow, aspiring students could practice the writing styles of famous authors. Of course, serious writers shouldn't model themselves after others. More specific areas would be the focus. Narrower subjects like technical writing might be promising, since they aren't particularly dependent on individuality in style.
- LeicaLatte 13y agoI will make a chuck palahniuk app someday.
- quenlinlom 13y agoPipe some Shakespearean soliloquies or portions of Milton into this and tell me how is the result supposed to be an improvement.
- NeoWang 13y agoInteresting, I opened Chrome Dev Tools and start violating some rules, but see no network traffic to the server. Is this purely implemented with js? With dictionaries loaded initially?
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoFixed: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors. If you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering logic. Try editing this sentence to remove the red. Adverbs are blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead. You can use a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints. Phrases in green show passive voice. Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button to compose something new.
- kablamo 13y agoExcellent app! This is the writing style my high school composition teacher drilled into my head. Everything I write now is influenced by her. I also try to write my code using this style. In fact, code and documentation and email should be: 1. As short as possible: Less words mean less stuff to maintain and comprehend. 2. Simple: The goal in business is to communicate well. Not to impress. And if I haven't communicated clearly, maintaining that code is going to be hard for the next person who has to read it.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoThe slowest processor in the room is the wetware between our ears. Shorter, simpler code is easier to write, read, understand, communicate, remember. Halve the code, get a 32X improvement!
- pvsnp 13y agoIt would be awesome if a "weasel words" highlighter or filter were to be added too. I have found that just removing some of these words from writing tends to have significant improvement in the clarity of writing. http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...
- egh 13y agoAll you need to know about this idiocy is that it rates actual writer's work (including Hemingway) as bad: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Don't use this. Just don't.
- LCDninja 13y agoI bashed a little bit of prose into it for fun ;-) --- I've always been impressed by Hemingway's writing style. Those long, rolling, complicated sentences transported me to a world where old men still fish; children care about the elderly, and the justice of the universe stands strong against agism. Every dog has his day. I remember enjoying a long bath on a five-star hotel on the beach in LA, a huge bath, replete with a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" and a little yellow rubber duck. It was then that I learned that my english teacher from years gone by was wrong. Long complicated sentences have their place in the literary world, it's just that they're not for everyone. Like this app. Some people love Hemingway, and others don't. I happen to love the writer, but an App that highlights beautifully complex sentences that require your full attention to understand: I'm not so sure about. Somebody once said something famous about judging, and that it's not the greatest thing to do. Nixon said that it's better to stand firm on principle and bend like a reed when it comes to matters of taste. For me, Hemmingway is a matter of taste. ---- This is how I scored in this fun game ;-) 2 of 12 sentences are hard to read. 1 of 12 sentences are very hard to read. 1 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer. 1 words or phrases can be simpler. 1 uses of passive voice. Aim for 2 or fewer. Interesting.
- fegu 13y agoI am impressed with the result of this. I spent some time on the source code (after deobfuscating it). The analysis done on the text is quite simple and fairly limited. Kudos on the convincing result nonetheless. Just a small note: looking at the source code almost made me look over my shoulder, there is about 30 different situations being reported to Google Analytics as events. The makers of this _really_ knows how you are using their product.
- kolo32 13y agoTry to paste the Gettysburg Address. "Four score and seven years ago..." - the sentence is very hard to read. "all men are created equal" and "we are engaged in a great civil war" - passive voice. And so on... The moral is that you should not trust an automatic tool to judge your writing style.
- awkwit 13y agoI'm running all my blog posts through this now just to find any low hanging fruit improvements.
- boh 13y agoWhat is the benefit of using this? Is it to write well? According to this system Marcel Proust, Edith Wharton and George Eliot are terrible writers. Is it because they didn't write proper blog posts or tweets? "Bold and Clear" doesn't mean good or intelligent.