Live data from Hacker News

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

hemingwayapp.com

181–190 of 335 posts

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#181
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems to be a different point or a muddled metaphor - people learning to walk are accidentally dancing (badly)?

I have not seen it established that passive constructions - where they are appropriate - are harder to use correctly or well. I have seen it asserted countless times, usually by people who don't know their passive from a hole in the ground and always without accompanying data.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#183

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.

The real Hemingway or the website? I was hoping someone would explore the idea this tool could remove elitism, since I haven't made up my mind on that (I think Paul's version is much more pleasant to read). I guess this is a start.

Thinking along those lines, has anyone put Jeff Atwood's writing into this thing? He's an extremely effective communicator to large tech audiences, and my guess is that he should have a more readable score on this thing than Paul would.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#185
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.

More to the point, in a longer work you might want to wander in and out of styles. Seems like this kind of tool would be better for shorter pieces, say under 3K words or so.

Definitely less than 5k. I tried pasting in Politics of the English Language and it is impossible to use. After a little while the text is double printed (err, lines on top of lines of text).

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#186

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.

As my sibling commenter said: there is no situation where the writer should artificially contort the sentence just to avoid using the passive voice.

The examples in the Hemmingway app are great examples of this. There is nothing wrong with the phrase "Phrases in green have been marked...". It is perfectly descriptive and reads quite naturally.

The passive voice is correct grammar. It is 100% properly constructed English. It's a matter of style. And while one should be aware of and able to manipulate their style, that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with any particular style.

Even long, frequently forking sentences are not wrong. They are just a form of style. Style is about conveying mood, and cannot be prohibited any more than the choice of words in the sentence can be prohibited.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#188
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.

> Something is either correct or it isn't

If you are building truth tables, then something is either correct or it isn't. But that's certainly not the case when using words to communicate ideas between humans.

After all, haven't each of us taken a multiple choice test with instructions to choose the most correct answer?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#189

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

irregardless, you knew what he meant, right?

I smell a troll...

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, but I had more fun writing it that way!
Post reply on HN