41–50 of 335 posts
[0] http://classicprose.com/ [1] http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technol...
I 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 hat…
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.
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-voi...
I 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 hat…
Personally what I need is an extension or scriptlet that embeds this into an arbitrary text box. I've struggled with adverbs in my writing. I am less worried about Hemingway about longer sentences or the use of a larger vocabulary since I'm generally writing for an audience other than the general public, though. Perhaps some tuning parameters would be nice.
I 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 hat…
You 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…
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.
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) 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.)
I 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 hat…
I guess personally I'm a bit put off by the UI. I'm reminded of a scene in the recent movie Her, where the AI offered some suggestions but only after being explicitly asked to do so. In HemingwayApp, the immediate red/yellow highlight will nudge the user into fixing the paragraph, whereas a more subtle colour and/or style might allow him more space to think "the computer is wrong this time, I like it more the way it is".
