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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

#111

Post by Angostura »

aroman wrote: post #68
mkrecny wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree! The Hemingway mode at seems to be geared (ironically) at technical writing. My English teacher wouldn't like it — it encourages simplification of language and minimization of word variation. Sometimes it's good to write like Austin...

I think I would use it to check marketing text for - say -the front page of a web site where I'm trying to pack as much as possible, as simply as possible into the least number of words.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#113

Post by dmarusic16 »

acqq wrote: post #46
onion2k wrote: 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.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#114

Post by imranq »

This is great, I can definitely see myself using this for long texts. What about having modes for different historical authors: Austin, Dostoevsky, Woolf. Who said that Hemingway was the golden standard?

Although I have to admit Hemingway's famous short short story (though possibly not his) gives me chills

"for sale, baby shoes, never worn"

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#116

Post by hluska »

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?

Have you ever read Tense Present by David Foster Wallace? If you haven't, find a copy online and enjoy! Based on your other comments, you'll appreciate DFW.

Short answer is that you should pardon my language, but English is fucked. So fucked that those of us native speakers should apologize for the state of our language. Not only is English constantly evolving (in different ways, in different English speaking countries), but the limited 'rules' are contradictory.

So, to answer your question about stats, we could take 10,000 English experts and lock them in a room until they write the English spec. In actual practice, they would die before they would ever agree on a set of rules. And then, even if they did come out with a spec, most famous writers would violate the spec at certain times.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#117

Post by jaimebuelta »

chadwickthebold wrote: post #14
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.

I just cannot stand having "errors" highlighted in red, so my tendency will be to feel bad for not correcting every one. It breaks my heart to see compiler warnings, even if I know that those specific ones are ok... Maybe is just me, but it will be conflicting for me, and potentially not useful...

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#118

Post by ajanuary »

hluska wrote: post #99
pmichaud wrote: post #33

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

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 w…

The 'language is evolving' and 'language is defined by usage' arguments go both ways.

When something was both not historically incorrect, and not considered incorrect by many current people, the arguments people make about it being wrong starts to crumble slightly.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#119

Post by SyneRyder »

serverascode wrote: post #31
pathdependent wrote: post #3

I like this app. However, most of my work Latex based. If you had something like this for Sublime Text, I would buy it.

I think I would too. I like the idea. Not sure about calling it Hemingway, because I am a huge fan of the writer, but I would like to have something like this available for Sublime. It might have to deal with markdown.

Another vote that I would like this within Sublime (although I'm not sure how that would work), and would really like for the tool to be able to interpret Markdown. Right now it gets confused by the markup for hyperlinks.

Looks like a great tool for me to take rambling blog drafts and trip them down while editing/refining.

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