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Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

hemingwayapp.com

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Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#51

Post by aresant »

Several 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...

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#53

Post by magicroundabout »

aymeric wrote: post #17

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."

er, "put some headphones on to reduce the odds of someone interrupting [you/him/her/null]."

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#55

Post by wmeredith »

acqq wrote: post #35

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…

Hmmm... thanks for commenting, acqq, but four out of nine sentences in your comment are hard to read. You also used four adverbs, try and aim for two or less.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#56

Post by acqq »

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…

Exactly. 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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#57

Post by hafabnew »

Neat!

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 (uses 4.75 instead of 4.71 .

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#58

Post by acqq »

wmeredith wrote: post #55
acqq wrote: post #35

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…

Hmmm... thanks for commenting, acqq, but four out of nine sentences in your comment are hard to read. You also used four adverbs, try and aim for two or less.

Yo my man! Four legs good, two legs bad!

(I really, really hope you don't get down-voted from those who miss the point).

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#59

Post by yock »

I 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.

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