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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

#101

Post by krmmalik »

normloman wrote: post #70

Professional writer here. Writing well takes years of practice. If you already write well, you won't need this program. You'll know the rules and the right times to break them. But if you can't put in the time and effort to become a great writer, just using this program can improve your writing a lot.

Glad to see the opinion of an actual professional writer rather than just someone with an opinion for the sake of it.

I'm trying very hard to improve my writing at the moment and reading Zinsser's book. I understand what Zinsser is encouraging us all to do, but putting it in practise is over 30 years of un-learning that I need to do so it's not easy.

I'm glad that you said the tool is useful because i was having doubts about it after seeing the other comments. Im going to use it to assess my next blog post and see how things pan out.

Thanks for the tip.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#103

Post by [deleted] »

jonnathanson wrote: post #24

I'm going to love using this. I write for a living, so I write a maddening volume of output per week. While I don't absolve myself of the need to edit everything, I'm working against the law of large numbers. Some stupid errors, or bad stylistic habits, are going to slip through the net every week. I've been jonesing for a real-time style editor for years. Autocorrect is fine and dandy (and often wrong, but that's an…

[deleted]

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#104

Post by nswanberg »

Paul Graham's writing seems simple and direct to me, so I wondered how the website would treat one of his essays. Here are the suggestions from the third paragraph of http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html:

"The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively (only) about English literature. (Sentence hard to read) Certainly (Adverb) schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes (Forms, makes up) a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. (Sentence very hard to read).

This is given a "readability" score of grade 14, which I suppose means it can only be deciphered by college sophomores or above.

I wondered how it would read after being rewritten to achieve a perfect score in the site, so I took a stab at it:

"In school students write essays about English literature. But real essays can be about many more things. Schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. All over the country students are not writing about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees. They are not writing about the role of color in fashion. They are not writing about what makes a good dessert. They are writing about symbolism in Dickens."

The result brings me straight back to my days of taking standardized tests, where the test had a snippet of some essay, and was followed by questions on the topic. There was information in those snippets, but very little tone. It could be a bad attempt at my part, but while the information remains in my version, the tone is gone--I can no longer smell the air of Cambridge in that writing.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#105

Post by onion2k »

acqq wrote: post #88
scotch_drinker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your point is that there are times when breaking the rules is a good thing. No one would argue with that. The problem is that most people have NO IDEA what the rules are for good writing. On top of that, it's easy to slip into overuse without realizing it. I'm a good writer and yet, one thing I'm terrible at is far too many adverbs. They aren't useful when overused. This app helps me see when I have relied to…

Who says that the rules from the app are even right? Anybody acually eveluated them on real books by known good writers? I want statistics: how often good writers are outside promoted rules?

The rules in the app are Hemingway's rules from his book "On Writing". Lots of other authors have written similar books and generally they all agree on what works.

Henry Miller and Stephen King have both written books on the subject, and both called their books "On Writing". E.M. Forster wrote one called "Aspects of the Novel". King actually goes further, to the point of saying things like "Don't use adjectives." Extreme for most written work but if you want to get your audience to use their imagination less direction is often better.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#106

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Thanks for posting this! I've been struggling to write my first novel, and I'm interested to see how I score with this.

Of course, when you're writing, many times you break the rules. At times grammatically incorrect dialog, for instance, scans better. You might leave a subject off a sentence, make the reader hunt around for it. You might make some sentences difficult in order to contrast them with freely-flowing sentences in the space afterwards. You might create long, difficult-to-read sentences punctuated with short declarative ones.

Wonder how this tool is going to know any of that?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#107

Post by Angostura »

pmichaud wrote: post #33
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…

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

The thing about the pedantic anti snark is, it doesn't matter if you can show that the 'incorrect' usage goes back to the 17th Century, if the bulk of the educated audience you are writing for thinks that it is incorrect. You might as well use the 'correct' usage.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#108

Post by DanielBMarkham »

mkrecny wrote: post #18
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.

More 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.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#109

Post by adam_b_long »

Hey guys, my name is Adam Long and my brother and I created Hemingway a few months ago!

Loving the comments here. As many of you pointed out, rules are meant to be broken. Our goal was to fix a simple problem: when you're looking at your own writing for too long, you start missing the simple, obvious errors.

You can follow me on Twitter @Adam_B_Long if you're interested in chatting about Hemingway with me.

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