Yes, I would $20+ dollars for a desktop version, that didn't suck at what this is supposed to be doing.
Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
151–160 of 335 posts
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say. If you're specifically talking about my use of "more correct", let me try another example of why I think "more correct" is useful nonsense. I'm Canadian. Therefore, I use spellings like "colour" and "honour". However, if I'm writing something primarily targeted to Americans, I switch to honor and color. It isn't that colour becomes incorrect when I write for an…
Something is either correct or it isn't, is the point.
You might instead write "closer to correct", but, how clunky.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#153I 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…
Also a big fan of the "desktop version" test, because it is triggered by the action of a user trying to get the desktop version as opposed to thinking they are about to answer a poll.
To that end, I wouldn't trust the data you would get if you asked people to state what they would be willing to pay. Self-reported data out of context is notoriously unreliable. Instead, really put it to the test. Tell people that you'll develop a desktop version if enough pledges are received, and ask people to make a binding pledge in advance. Give them a discount for jumping in early, of course, but use the average pledge as a guideline for final pricing.
If the median pledge amount is, say, $10, then you could probably assume that people would be willing to pay $15 once the product was actually available for download. (Those are made-up numbers, but you get the idea.)
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#154You 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
It's worth noting, though, that many readers will be distracted by your use of less with counting nouns. Whether that's a pro or a con is up to you.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It was a reference to the Hemingway app. If you paste acqq's comment into Hemingway, it suggests "Four adverbs used. Try to aim for two or less."
As humour goes, it's a few levels of indirection away from Seinfeld. But you're on a forum full of people who spend all day thinking of abstractions for their abstractions, so what do you expect?
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#156Found a bug: type in "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" and watch the highlighting break.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#157I'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…
One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence. I have been mulling an NLTK powered editor for quite awhile now and this PoC is exciting.
But I want to much more!
* Measure for consistent voicing
* Apply arbitrary-ish user supplied rules
* Analyze grammar in sentence structure
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#158A fun contrast to this would be kottke.org's "Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace" from a while back: http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-...
Also: I haven't read a whole lot of Hemingway, but when I did read him, I always thought he was much more versatile a writer than made out to be.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I noticed. It seemed to mark your writing higher the lower the reading grade level it was targeted at. I didn't realize that writing at a 5th grade level was the pinnacle of writing. What is with it's fear of adverbs?
Well, Vladimir Nabokov did describe Hemingway as "a writer of books for boys".
Who was Nabokov writing for?
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#160Nice! I love good quality code: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup-obf.js
I especially like how easy you can guess the non-obfuscated version: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup.js