5 ms·
I'd love there to be a proliferation of plugins for different writing styles. Hemmingway, Austin, Asimov, Wilde etc. Not so interested in "improving writing", m
by mkrecny 13y ago
I'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.
- Steuard 13y agoIs your point here that cramming extra adverbs into one's writing just for their own sake is poor style? That's what your example seems to illustrate, and I emphatically agree. But when adverbs come up naturally in expressing an idea, I'd hate to suggest to anyone that it's a bad thing!
- lclarkmichalek 13y agoKind of a funny example, given that you change the meaning from one sentence to another.
- jnbiche 13y agoPrecisely!
- philwelch 13y agoConversely, writing at such a level that only graduate students in your particular field of interest can decipher your meaning must be the pinnacle of writing. As we all know, the purpose of language is to obscure meaning, not to communicate it.
- Noxchi 13y agoWell, what is the point of writing? Or communication in general? Originally, it developed to transfer ideas from one mind to another, in the most intact way possible, while consuming the least amount of energy. But academics and English teachers masturbated themselves a career by gradually applying arbitrarily rules on the use of words, and enforcing them on their students (hey, what else were they supposed to teach for 4 years?). So writing no longer has the goal of transferring ideas from one mind to another, in the most intact way possible, while consuming the least amount of energy. Instead it has arbitrary rules put on it, that require it to pass certain tests of style to get a passing mark from the teachers. So academics in their ivory towers expect you to write in a way only they would understand, while copywriters who are rolling in dough who write ads to the common man, wouldn't let anything out that was above a "7th grade" level.
- 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.