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You 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 r
by jawns 13y ago
You 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?
- leephillips 13y agoWell, Vladimir Nabokov did describe Hemingway as "a writer of books for boys".
- chris_mahan 13y agoAmericans are big boys.
- dllthomas 13y agoWho was Nabokov writing for?
- nekopa 13y agoYoung girls?
- datashaman 13y agoAbout, not for.
- normloman 13y agoMost amateur writers clutter their writing with unnecessary adverbs. Sometimes, a well placed adverb can add vividness to your writing. But most adverbs we throw around casually can be omitted without consequence. Great writing rests on the foundation of bold verbs and nouns.
- runevault 13y agoI wouldn't say it is so much about removing adverbs alone as removing the adverb and replacing the verb with one that takes the place of both words.
- jnbiche 13y agoWhen you unthinkingly use far too many adverbs in your writing, you clearly reduce an otherwise well-written piece to an increasingly confusing and complex mass of terribly overwrought words. vs When you use too many adverbs in your writing, you reduce a well-written piece to a confusing mass of words.
- Angostura 13y agoI think I would use it to check marketing text for - say -the front page of a web site where I'm trying to pack as much as possible, as simply as possible into the least number of words.
- omaranto 13y agoWhich Austin did you mean? Jane [1]? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_G._Austin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_G._Austin
- kibibu 13y agoStone Cold, presumably. http://www.amazon.com/The-Stone-Cold-Truth-WWE/dp/1476751684 http://www.amazon.com/The-Stone-Cold-Truth-WWE/dp/1476751684
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoMore to the point, in a longer work you might want to wander in and out of styles. Seems like this kind of tool would be better for shorter pieces, say under 3K words or so.
- dfc 13y agoDefinitely less than 5k. I tried pasting in Politics of the English Language and it is impossible to use. After a little while the text is double printed (err, lines on top of lines of text).
- EliAndrewC 13y agoA neat trick for helping you write in the style of a particular author: use a list of all the words in their collected works as the dictionary in your word processor. Then you'll see any word that e.g. Jane Austin never used as a misspelling, so it's easy to only write using the vocabulary that she used.
- frosted_moose 13y agoAgreed! It reminds me of advice I commonly get when I started writing: borrow a voice, and grow your own out from that. This is a great way to do that, I think -- it's internalizes the process and makes it a form of muscle memory. That sort of second-nature shit is invaluable to finding yourself. Yum yum yum.
- Perceval 13y agoHow about Faulkner? 20 of 20 sentences were too easy to read. Try combining all of your sentences into one page-long complex-compound sentence by overusing comma run-ons and semicolons and em-dashes and ellipses and strings of conjunctions.
- MaysonL 13y agoTo offer my own pedantic snark, Austin is the capital of Texas. Austen is the author's name.
- gabemart 13y agoThat is neat. I pasted in the first part of Big Two-Hearted River [1] and it scored a little "worse" than the first part of the novel I'm working on, suggesting it's not a perfect metric for how "Hemingway-like" a text is. I've always thought that the cultural meme of Hemingway's terseness is not a very good representation of his actual writing style. In the past when I've been prompted to try parodying Hemmngway [2], the result usually tends to a style that's a little more verbose. [1] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/hem_river.html http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/hem_river.html [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1t9571/wp_someone_wakes_up_prepares_some_coffee_and/ce5pfzo http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1t9571/wp_so...
- coreypein 13y agoI also fed a chunk my unfinished novel into the Hemingway app, and wrote about the results: http://coreypein.net/blog/2014/02/13/the-hemingway-app-reviewed/ http://coreypein.net/blog/2014/02/13/the-hemingway-app-revie... I really wanted to hate it, but couldn't.
- hissworks 13y ago>> Aim for 2 or fewer. This also violates current usage conventions for handling numbers in text.[1] Figures are only meant to be used in greater numbers (a rule of thumb is anything over 30, but I think I read that in a David Foster Wallace text, fwiw) with more complex verbal / textual representations - that is, not "two". [1] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/593/01/ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/593/01/
- jordan0day 13y agoYeah the harping on "fewer" vs. "less" and completely ignoring the "2" bothered me too. In my time as a newspaper writer (long ago), the general rule of thumb we used was once you hit 13, switch to numbers. Of course, newspapers have different priorities regarding space, so I could understand if this rule is different for other forms of writing.
- dllthomas 13y agoI think the "2" is appropriate here. This is not protracted discourse, it's a label. When my sentence lights up some color, and my eyes jump to the sidebar and find that color, we want the max count to pop in a way that it shouldn't in ordinary text.
- ScottBurson 13y agoI recall reading somewhere the phrase "nine or 10". Clearly the writer (or editor) was adhering rather mindlessly to the house rule.
- pmichaud 13y agoThe thing about pedantic snark (less/fewer), is that it loses its teeth when you're wrong. Even if you go in for prescriptive grammar, less and fewer were never strictly divided. The distinction actually came to us through one Mr. Baker's expressed preference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less#Historical_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less#Historical_usage
- mherdeg 13y agoOK, so on the one hand, Alfred the Great used less with counting nouns in 888 AD. But can we really trust this guy for historical precedent? He burnt the cakes!
- kordless 13y ago> He burnt the cakes! Maybe he was gluten intolerant.
- tehwalrus 13y agoThis, and singular they[1], make me very happy indeed - all the people who "correct" my grammar are actually, themselves, wrong (or, at most, people waving an opinion in my face as if it were a fact.) <3 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
- commandar 13y agoThere are a lot of prescriptive "rules" in English that aren't really rules. Ending sentences in prepositions is probably my favorite.
- evanb 13y ago"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." --Churchill (maybe) Some discussion: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001702.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001702.h...
- 13y ago
- acqq 13y agoExactly. Strunk and White actually devised their "rules" without the exact analysis of the real texts. Likewise, I can imagine HemingwayApp giving the real Hemingway bad notes.
- toxik 13y agoThat's funny, because I tried your comment in Hemingway and it came out with a much better score after I erased every letter of it.
- deeviant 13y agoIt's not like there some magic linguistic genie that they are going to for their analysis. A programmatic engine to determine which long sentence or use of passive-voice are bad or not is not trivial, if even possible with their resources. Just identifying the hopefully few uses of complicated sentences and passive-voice would allow one to quickly sort through them and make a decision on whether the usage was proper or not. They did a great job, it's a nice app.
- enduser 13y agoYour last sentence was "very hard to read"
- andrewliebchen 13y agoYou're right. Though we can tell you didn't compose your comment in Hemingway. It characterizes one of your sentences as "hard to read," and another as "very hard to read."
- dclara 13y agoIt's so funny. Looks like our brains are evolving towards monkey. Or we should start from our first literature class and let teacher to emphasis on the effective expression skill on top of grammar. Sometimes I saw very good comments which are very long but informative. It takes us time to compose and read, but that's more valuable than short sentences. What is a better way for communication?
- jimmcslim 13y ago> You know what's fun? Pasting in text from Ernest Hemingway and seeing what he did wrong. I was thinking about giving some Joyce a pass through this...
- makr17 13y agoI pasted the text of the Declaration of Independence. Boy was that fun... 9 of 46 sentences are hard to read. 19 of 46 sentences are very hard to read. 12 adverbs. Aim for 11 or less. 8 words or phrases can be simpler. 12 uses of passive voice. Aim for 9 or less.
- bgilroy26 13y agoWriting a lot of short sentences develops your sense for when a long one is appropriate.
- ojbyrne 13y agoNot to mention that the Chicago Manual of Style recommends spelling out the number "two."
- chacham15 13y agoI believe the general rule is that any number which is written with fewer than three words is actually done so. All the cases listed here: http://writing-style-guide.papercheck.com/~paperch1/index.php?title=Expressing_Numbers_MLA http://writing-style-guide.papercheck.com/~paperch1/index.ph...
- wyclif 13y agoIt should say "aim for two or fewer", since it's better style to spell out any number < 10.
- adam_b_long 13y agoOK OK I fixed it ;)
- mVChr 13y agoIt would be nice to be able to dismiss the error highlighting for certain words or phrases. Or better yet, click on the highlight to change it to a less distracting dotted underline. I like knowing what is unclear or indirect, but sometimes I want to break the Hemingway rules by conscious choice. (And yes, I used the app to make sure to write this with passing marks.)
- coldtea 13y agoOr "Aim for two or less". It's not a good style to write quantities below ten with digits.