You should add a warning class for possible misspellings, too. It would be nice to not need to use a separate spell checker.
Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
211–220 of 335 posts
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#212"Why do we drive on the parkway, but fetishize an impossible and ridiculous masculinity on the Hemingway?"
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#213Earlier 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.
I could say the same about acceptability. You either accept something or don't. Grudging acceptance is still acceptance, right?
Meanwhile, you can assign a mathematical measure of partial correctness for, say, sets of statements, simply as the fraction of correct statements over the total. In linguistics, you can assign measures to both acceptibility and correctness simultaneously by taking the fraction of people who "accept" a construct as "correct".
I'm not even sure how many levels of meta I'm at, so I'm done.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#214You 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…
You're right. Though we can tell you didn't compose your comment in Hemingway. It characterizes one of your sentences as "hard to read," and another as "very hard to read."
It's so funny. Looks like our brains are evolving towards monkey. Or we should start from our first literature class and let teacher to emphasis on the effective expression skill on top of grammar.
Sometimes I saw very good comments which are very long but informative. It takes us time to compose and read, but that's more valuable than short sentences.
What is a better way for communication?
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#215I'd love to see this as a firefox extension.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#216Interestingly it marks the infamous Zero Wing intro as grade 3 or 4, but considers the "correct" translation to be Grade 6 and complains about the "all of" they use.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zero_Wing
EDIT: Forgot HN isn't Markdown.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might not be able to force people to write well, but you can help them not write badly. That's the point of apps like this one - mediocre is better than bad. Once someone has improved their writing to the point where this app is no longer useful they can easily switch to something else. Writing is a skill that few people have really learnt to do well. For them, following some "random rules" will improve what they…
Forcing somebody to write short sentences wouldn't improve his writing.
I know people already pointed this out, but I'll add my 2 cents: Every single teacher I've had told me to shorten my sentences.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#218Professional writer here. Writing well takes years of practice. If you already write well, you won't need this program. You'll know the rules and the right times to break them. But if you can't put in the time and effort to become a great writer, just using this program can improve your writing a lot.
I think most of us have a writing skill level beyond the average, which cannot compare with the professional writers.
And I do believe that language capability is very important because it's the bridge between us and other people.
But the new trend is leading towards making everything simple and easy for everybody to absorb. It's even better to make it under college level. I don't quite agree with it. We should influence the next generation with excellent language expression more than simplifying it.
One more point is: if we need to publish our articles, better to use professional editors online to edit it. Proof reading or editing is always necessary for all the publications, like magazine and books, right?
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#219Who will make the Faulkner? It highlights your sentence red if it doesn't go for at least a page and a half.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#220I 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 havi…
I would venture that the problem with pcgbook.com is not the quality of writing, but the fact that most of the authors are not native english speakers. They seem to be mostly Dutch or at least living in Copenhagen.