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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

#161

Post by sitkack »

ivansavz wrote: post #137
diydsp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utilize has a rightful place in the English language. [1][2] Just because so many people misuse it, doesn't mean it should be ghettoized. Remember a few days ago when an article suggested that we may be shaping our lives according to the capability of machines and there were many naysayers? People nixing a perfectly useful word because a machine can easily recognize is a perfect example of us accomodating our ways to…

> Utilize has a rightful place in the English language. [1][2] Neither of the these articles make a very strong point. Just because the Merriam-Webster felt this "use for unintended purpose" connotation doesn't mean it's true. I'm still of the opinion that "utilize" is completely useless---it is simply the French verb for "to use." The use of "utilize" in English is a classic "wanting to be fancy by using the French…

So can I utilize the word utilize to appear sounding fancy?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#162

Post by dllthomas »

jordan0day wrote: post #134
hissworks wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Aim for 2 or fewer. This also violates current usage conventions for handling numbers in text.[1] Figures are only meant to be used in greater numbers (a rule of thumb is anything over 30, but I think I read that in a David Foster Wallace text, fwiw) with more complex verbal / textual representations - that is, not "two". [1] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/593/01/

Yeah the harping on "fewer" vs. "less" and completely ignoring the "2" bothered me too. In my time as a newspaper writer (long ago), the general rule of thumb we used was once you hit 13, switch to numbers. Of course, newspapers have different priorities regarding space, so I could understand if this rule is different for other forms of writing.

I think the "2" is appropriate here. This is not protracted discourse, it's a label. When my sentence lights up some color, and my eyes jump to the sidebar and find that color, we want the max count to pop in a way that it shouldn't in ordinary text.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#163

Post by hyperbovine »

hluska wrote: post #140
sqrt17 wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

Coming from a Canadian, perhaps the most correct response would be to chide us on our pursuit of a more perfect union :-)

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#164

Post by anExcitedBeast »

CalRobert wrote: post #146
CalRobert wrote: post #142

This saddens me. I appreciate clear writing as much as anyone, but are we not denuding our language if we attempt to describe everything using short sentences and a small lexicon? I hate reading James Fenimore Cooper as much as the next person (including, notably, Twain), but surely there is a place for complex ideas expressed with a rich vocabulary and nuanced structure.

And no adverbs?!???? That's just ludicrous. I modified an adjective with one right there. I regret nothing!

To be fair, "just" rarely adds any value.

"That's just ludicrous." vs "That's ludicrous."

Reads pretty much the same.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#165

Post by dllthomas »

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…

Denotationally, there are never examples where such functions are necessary in most languages (with operational constraints and a sufficiently dumb compiler, you can make anything necessary). This doesn't mean that there are never examples where such functions are appropriate.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#166

Post by lutusp »

rnprdk wrote: post #158

A 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.

> 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.

Remember that Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and many other writers began as newspaper reporters, where over time they learned to express complex stories with the fewest words.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#167

Post by dllthomas »

lutusp wrote: post #133
Agathos wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passive voice has its place. But sentences in the form, "x is something that is y," are difficult to defend. Just write "Passive is important in good writing." (Even worse: https://twitter.com/Graham_LRR/status/387778330054774784 )

The point is not whether passive voice has a place in good writing, it's to make young writers aware of the difference between active and passive voice, and when each is appropriate (or "strongest").

The advocation of a limit discourages that interpretation.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#168

Post by RogerL »

I think the concept people are reaching for is the idea of false positives and negatives. Yes, if you have a bad sentence there is a good chance it will highlight it. But, perhaps not (false positive). Similarly, it will flag many perfectly fine sentences not pitched to 7 graders (false negatives).

Here is text I more or less randomly chose from MOMA's site. Almost all of it is graded as "very hard to read".

Where is the cutting edge of the motion picture? Discover it first at MoMA. Building upon the Museum's long tradition of exploring cinematic experimentation, Modern Mondays is a showcase for innovation on screen. Engage with contemporary filmmakers and moving image artists, and rediscover landmark works that changed the way we experience film and media.

Any edit I make to that paragraph that makes the app happy seems to diminish the text.

In contrast, my first paragraph is graded better than the MOMA text, yet I think it is worse. The one thing it did complain about were the adverbs 'similarly' and 'perfectly'. The former is required to draw the comparison; the second is perhaps redundant, but I am emphasizing to make a point - redundancy is as much a tool in writing as it is a crutch or error.

I'm not saying the app is useless, just take the output with a huge grain of salt. Heck, if I paste text from Hemingway it is a sea of red and yellow.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#169

Post by lutusp »

sitkack wrote: post #157
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…

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

> One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence.

It would be nice to have a tool that detects such things, but for the moment, a detailed editing pass is a good idea. I always edit what I write, indeed most of the time I'm writing and editing in parallel.

> But I want to much more!

I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated methods will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's originator.

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