Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear • Hacker News Board

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#11

Post by jaimebuelta » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:39 PM UTC

I 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 :_(

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#12

Post by colig » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:43 PM UTC

I 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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#13

Post by lhnz » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:43 PM UTC

Well, 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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#14

Post by chadwickthebold » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:45 PM UTC

jaimebuelta wrote: post #11

I 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 b…

I 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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#15

Post by moron4hire » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:46 PM UTC

There is nothing wrong with the passive voice.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#16

Post by sailfast » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:51 PM UTC

pistle wrote: post #7

For 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.

I have a methodology we can leverage to build a framework that will maximize the killing of 'utilize'. Ping me later to discuss.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#17

Post by aymeric » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:51 PM UTC

This 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."

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#18

Post by mkrecny » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:52 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#19

Post by cwaniak » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

Now 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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#20

Post by gabemart » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 2:56 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #5

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…

That 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

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1t9571/wp_so...