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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

#171

Post by lutusp »

crntaylor wrote: post #155
lutusp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> If you paste acqq's comment into Hemingway, it suggests "Four adverbs used. Try to aim for two or less."

Okay, that made my day. :)

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#172

Post by lutusp »

dllthomas wrote: post #167
lutusp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that writing is like walking -- at first, you only have one way to walk, the one that keeps you from falling onto the carpet. Only later do you learn how to dance. It's the same with writing -- avoid obvious mistakes until you're skilled enough to use them for an intended effect.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#173

Post by epitrochoidal »

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

irregardless, you knew what he meant, right?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#174

Post by deeviant »

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…

It's not like there some magic linguistic genie that they are going to for their analysis. A programmatic engine to determine which long sentence or use of passive-voice are bad or not is not trivial, if even possible with their resources. Just identifying the hopefully few uses of complicated sentences and passive-voice would allow one to quickly sort through them and make a decision on whether the usage was proper or not.

They did a great job, it's a nice app.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#176

Post by rnprdk »

normloman wrote: post #86
moron4hire wrote: post #15

There is nothing wrong with the passive voice.

It's not technically wrong, no. Nobody will accuse you of having bad grammar. But every good writing style manual warns against using it. Because the active voice is clear, bold, and more concise. There are only a few situations where writers should prefer the passive voice.

Many "good writing style manual[s]" are kind of full of it.

An interesting bit from the wiki(1) on passive voice: "For example, despite Orwell's advice to avoid the passive, his Politics and the English Language (1946) employs passive voice for about 20 percent of its constructions."

As with anything, it's important to be aware of what you're doing. But back when I tutored people in writing, hard-and-fast rules like this resulted in awkward, contorted writing by scared students. For example, I once knew a very smart person who avoided predicate adjectives at all costs. I don't really blame him for confusing passive voice and predicate adjective. I even found cases where the Hemingway app confused the two. But it was too bad that he had been so thoroughly brainwashed against the passive. Though I kind of admired how he managed to avoid, for years of his life, what I think is an indispensable construction.

1 -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Advice_in...

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#177

Post by munificent »

I think people are reading a bit too much into the name, and into the feedback the app gives. I don't think it's "get rid of all the pastels and your writing will be like Heminway's", nor do I even think "get rid of all the warnings" is what it's trying to do.

It is useful for a writer to throw some text at it and see what you can learn. More feedback is almost always better for writers. The trick, is always, is having the judgement to incorporate intelligently.

For example, I stumbled onto a book about procedural content generation in games[1]. As a writer, game programmer, and dedicated fan of roguelikes, if this book were any farther up my alley, it would be banging against the back fence.

But, ugh, when I tried to read it, I just gave up after a few paragraphs. It's not gibberish, but it's almost physically painful to wring the actual information out of it.

And, indeed, when I throw some of those paragraphs at this app, I see:

    Paragraphs: 1
    Sentences: 31
    Words: 833
    Characters: 4196
    11 of 31 sentences are hard to read.
    11 of 31 sentences are very hard to read.
    10 adverbs. Aim for 0 or less.
    10 words or phrases can be simpler.
    13 uses of passive voice. Aim for 6 or less.
If the authors took a bit of advice from this app, they'd end up with a better book. That sounds like a win to me.

[1]: http://pcgbook.com/

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#178

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #152
hluska wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#179

Post by JasonFruit »

nswanberg wrote: post #104

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…

I don't think Hemingway could breathe at Cambridge.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#180

Post by admiralpumpkin »

aymeric wrote: post #17

This is great. I struggle with correcting my use of passive voice and I wish there were suggestions. For example, how would you rephrase this? "put some headphones on to reduce the odds of being interrupted by someone."

headphones reduce the odds of some interrupting you
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