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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

#221

Post by normloman »

krmmalik wrote: post #101
normloman wrote: post #70

Professional 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.

Glad to see the opinion of an actual professional writer rather than just someone with an opinion for the sake of it. I'm trying very hard to improve my writing at the moment and reading Zinsser's book. I understand what Zinsser is encouraging us all to do, but putting it in practise is over 30 years of un-learning that I need to do so it's not easy. I'm glad that you said the tool is useful because i was having doub…

That's a classic book!

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#222

Post by mnx »

hluska wrote: post #116
acqq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says that the rules from the app are even right? Anybody acually eveluated them on real books by known good writers? I want statistics: how often good writers are outside promoted rules?

Have you ever read Tense Present by David Foster Wallace? If you haven't, find a copy online and enjoy! Based on your other comments, you'll appreciate DFW. Short answer is that you should pardon my language, but English is fucked. So fucked that those of us native speakers should apologize for the state of our language. Not only is English constantly evolving (in different ways, in different English speaking countri…

I think you under-appreciate how simple English is. Sure, creating a set of rules for perfect writing is probably impossible, and in German you could probably fit them on a single page (I'm exaggerating, I don't speak German well enough to precisely judge that). But getting to a decent level of English is probably the easiest of all widely spoken natural languages. That is if we forget your atrocious non-existing spelling and pronunciation rules.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#223

Post by squirejons »

The coder opened his IDE. The IDE was on the screen of his monitor. The IDE was colorful in the dimly lit room. The coder opened his can of Red Bull. He drank once from it and put it down. Then he placed his fingers on the keyboard and began coding. It was PHP code, and it was good. He typed into the night and early morning. He got up and went to bed. He felt good. He did not think about the woman that night because he was tired. That was good, too.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#224

Post by munificent »

whatsreal wrote: post #220
munificent wrote: post #177

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 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.

Either way, the problem is the quality of the writing. It just may be that the cause of that is the authors not being native English speakers. :)

(The fact that they're adopting an academic tone doesn't help either, for that matter.)

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#225

Post by Mz »

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

The thing about pedantic snark (less/fewer), is that it loses its teeth when you're wrong.

The thing about pedantic snark is that, whether it is right or wrong in its details, it almost always comes from a place of hostility and is thus a form of assholery. It indicates the individual "values" good grammar or whatever a helluva lot more than they value respect or politeness.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#226

Post by Steuard »

jnbiche wrote: post #132
mhurron wrote: post #79

Earlier 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?

When you unthinkingly use far too many adverbs in your writing, you clearly reduce an otherwise well-written piece to an increasingly confusing and complex mass of terribly overwrought words. vs When you use too many adverbs in your writing, you reduce a well-written piece to a confusing mass of words.

Is your point here that cramming extra adverbs into one's writing just for their own sake is poor style? That's what your example seems to illustrate, and I emphatically agree.

But when adverbs come up naturally in expressing an idea, I'd hate to suggest to anyone that it's a bad thing!

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#227

Post by cjg »

I think very few people would actually like using a desktop version, because it breaks your workflow.

Anyone who is prepared to hand over money for something like this ideally wants it integrated into their current writing environment, be that Word, LibreOffice, Scrivener, Dark Room or whatever.

Plugins are the way to commercialise this (if that's at all possible).

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#228

Post by Mz »

I have a question about the app itself:

I grew up in a bilingual home. My mom is a German immigrant who spoke no English when she met my American father. So in spite of having a good education and getting high praise for the content I produce, I find that I often write in "Germish." I need help with spelling, punctuation and grammar. The technical aspect of my writing is shockingly only fair to middlin' at best, sigh.

Spelling help is not hard to find but punctuation and grammar help is hard to find. So how helpful is it with that stuff? Because it looks like it focuses on tone or something, not basic grammar per se?

Thanks.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#229

Post by bane »

sqrt17 wrote: post #122
hluska wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't think the proposed edit would help, the commenter isn't actually wrong - in modern usage, it is more correct to say "fewer corrections" than "less corrections." Language doesn't form in a vacuum, nor is its growth confined to dictionaries. Rather, language is a living, breathing thing and grammar is closer to history than mechanics. Consider the less v. fewer debate. Yes, several hundred years ago, it w…

"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…

'correct' is definitely gradable and is commonly used as such. There is a nice long history of such usage going back at least a quarter of a millennium.

"Which is more correct? This or that?"

There's even "most correct" as in "it is most correct to choose..."

This is due to the simple fact that in many non-trivial fields, correctness is not absolute and thus multiple correct choices or outcomes are valid. Local preferences might recognize this, but prefer one over the other. In noun usage, this is a carryover from verb usage

"My shoes were mostly corrected by the cobbler." is perfectly fine, so users of English also find that "The fit of my shoes is mostly correct." is also perfectly valid usage.

More examples:

Which partial phrase emphasizes, and persuades better a point better (as a matter of rhetoric)?

"It is most correct to take this option."

"It is a preference to take this option."

Of course the former is stronger than the latter.

"correct" clearly grades.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#230

Post by sitkack »

lutusp wrote: post #169
sitkack wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

But for a lot of writing this is a good thing, having cohesive writing trumps losing the voice. It isn't fiction that I think these tools will be useful or desirable for, it is the mountains of technical writing we are drowning in.

More troubling is the use of automated writing tools for propaganda and psyops.

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