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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

#91
post #46
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forcing somebody to write short sentences wouldn't improve his writing.

Yeah it does. Long sentences are harder to read. Bad writers write too many long sentences, and it makes their writing difficult to parse. So just forcing them to write shorter sentences will improve their writing a great deal.

That said, a good writer will know when using a long sentence is the right choice for emphasis. And there's no way this program could ever develop that level of good judgement. This program isn't good for writers. It's good for non writers who want to quickly improve their shitty writing without effort.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#92
Neat! I just pasted in a chapter from a book I may or may not be writing. It's a useful experience. It definitely pointed out some things that could be better.

However, it's wrong a lot of the time. I'd encourage you to add a little explanatory note for people less confident in their writing. Something about how no computer is a substitute, they should make the final decisions, etc. It'd also be great to have a feature where I could bless particular sentences. Good editors make useful suggestions, but they also know to let marginal things go if the author disagrees.

Also, two minor bugs: any paragraph after multiple blank lines gets entirely highlighted in red. And you shouldn't capture the control-tab keystroke and convert it into a tab character. Every time I try to leave that window, I end up mangling my text.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#94
This is great for writing scientific articles, manuals, tutorials, text books and the like. I'll start using it right now :)

However, as far as literature is concerned, I'd not be using it. The title is misleading in that respect. Something along the lines "simple", "clean", "focused" writing would be better.

BTW: I have to paste some page-sized sentences from Thomas Pynchon in there.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#96
I love this, and I love your test for the desktop version.

One suggestion, make the price a slider from $0->$100 and instead of asking "Would you pay $5 for a desktop version of Hemingway? It would add the ability to save and open text files." ask "Please suggest a price for the desktop version"

This will give you a better idea of the true value of the application to people without being suggestive.

Awesome idea and implementation!

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#99
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…

The 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

While I don't think the proposed edit would help, the commenter isn't actually wrong - in modern usage, it is more correct to say "fewer corrections" than "less corrections." Language doesn't form in a vacuum, nor is its growth confined to dictionaries. Rather, language is a living, breathing thing and grammar is closer to history than mechanics.

Consider the less v. fewer debate. Yes, several hundred years ago, it was just fine to say "less corrections." However, for whatever reason, the upper crust decided that "fewer corrections" both looked and sounded better. Consequently, "less corrections" evolved to be less correct. My inner smartass wanted to say "fewer correct", but that would be a silly joke.

It's like Russian. If you speak French, you can understand many Russian words. This isn't because French and Russian are linguistic cousins. Rather, it's because French was the language of nobility and words trickled down.

Or heck, we could talk about the word "you." You was originally formal, whereas "thou" was more relaxed and informal. Yet, today, if I started a comment on Hacker News with, "I fear thou are wrong", it would seem needlessly formal.

To conclude this long mess (it was supposed to be four lines and turned into paragraphs), language evolves constantly. Though certain distinctions didn't exist in earlier English, they exist now. However, if you know much about the history and formation of English, you should be less pedantic. It should also make us much more tolerant of people for whom English isn't their native language. We speak an intensely complex language with random rules that apply in some cases and not others.

Thank heavens we don't have to compile our language before we speak it...:)

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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

This, 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.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

There are a lot of prescriptive "rules" in English that aren't really rules. Ending sentences in prepositions is probably my favorite.
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