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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

#121

Post by gruseom »

imranq wrote: post #114

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"

That wasn't Hemingway. The first recognizable version was by William R. Kane. Never heard of William R. Kane? Me neither; hence the Hemingway. Quotes always bond to the nearest plausible famous person.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#122

Post by sqrt17 »

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…

"more correct" is nonsense, since 'correct' is not a gradable adjective. "more acceptable" would be correct.

Whether "less [count-noun]" is acceptable depends on granularity: "less than two adverbs" is acceptable whenever it feels alright to you to just abstract adverbs into a pure number. "less than two corrections" is not acceptable to most people because corrections don't lend themselves to being abstracted into a number.

Languages are not random. It's just that prescriptivist get hung up on random subsets of language and pretend they've seen all of it.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#123

Post by flurpitude »

pistle wrote: post #7

For presenting utilize as a wasteful term, I want to tearfully hug everyone involved in this. Please kill 'utilize.' We should reach out to stakeholders and incentivize the sunsetting of the leveraging of the word 'utilize' from all slide decks. Slide decks - the (not) new version of the tri-fold foam presentation board. It's the clear binder of our age.

I replaced "utilize" with "leverage" and this app did not complain, which made me sad.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#124

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#127

Post by EliAndrewC »

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.

A neat trick for helping you write in the style of a particular author: use a list of all the words in their collected works as the dictionary in your word processor. Then you'll see any word that e.g. Jane Austin never used as a misspelling, so it's easy to only write using the vocabulary that she used.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#129

Post by lutusp »

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.

> try and aim for two or less.

I hope this was meant as provocation. I'm guessing you actually meant, "Try to aim for two or fewer," yes?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#130

Post by dllthomas »

In addition to the unfair maligning of the passive, I note that the following (simplified from a line in http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922) is not marked as passive despite being so:

"This example will go unidentified as passive if you trust bad grammar-checking programs."

The problem is never the passive per se - it's unclear writing, period. Sometimes that involves passive voice.

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