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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

#231

Post by bane »

Angostura wrote: post #107
pmichaud wrote: post #33

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

The thing about the pedantic anti snark is, it doesn't matter if you can show that the 'incorrect' usage goes back to the 17th Century, if the bulk of the educated audience you are writing for thinks that it is incorrect. You might as well use the 'correct' usage.

You should write for your audience. The only thing that's correct or incorrect is if you succeeded in communicating with the intended recipient.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#232

Post by tormeh »

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.

Ahahaha! How many textbooks have you read? How many American ones? The majority of them suck. Wikipedia can usually be counted upon to be clearer. And the more academic the books are, the more they suck. Actually, I would guess that how often the words "I", "you" and other personal pronouns referring to the author and reader appear in a book would be a powerful positive predictor of the book's quality.

Sure, being non-native doesn't help, but the world of academic writing has far, FAR bigger problems than that.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#233

Post by kriro »

I wonder if you could get a negative score by pasting some translated Kant :P

Pretty cool, might use it as a quick checkup tool, would pay the 5$. Any word on what happens to the pasted text? I can't find any terms of use.

Could be really useful if you could change the rating rules. I'd like to adapt it to academic texts for example. There's some use beyond style as well since you could automatically check for superlatives (or adjectives in general) and the like that are generally not wanted and some other typical constructs that should be avoided.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#234

Post by lclarkmichalek »

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.

Kind of a funny example, given that you change the meaning from one sentence to another.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#235

Post by adam_b_long »

colig wrote: post #12

I like it. Is the grade level calculated with Fleisch-Kincaid? $5 is a reasonable price (to me) for a minimal text editor with this feature, though I would prefer something meatier and more expensive along the likes of Scrivener.

We use the Automated Readability Index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#236

Post by joe_the_user »

normloman wrote: post #91
acqq wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing somebody to write short sentences wouldn't improve his writing.

Yeah it does. Long sentences are harder to read. Bad writers write too many long sentences, and it makes their writing difficult to parse. So just forcing them to write shorter sentences will improve their writing a great deal. That said, a good writer will know when using a long sentence is the right choice for emphasis. And there's no way this program could ever develop that level of good judgement. This program is…

You can't force someone to write well by any means.

Good writing is sensitive to multiple contexts and multiple rules. Essentially, one has to be able to shift-gears and notice the results of your writing, how your audience will receive it.

The only way a person becomes a good writer is through self-direct study. A bad writer who writes long sentences without noticing the results will remain a bad writer if someone forces them to divide their sentences, because they are still not being aware of the results of their writing.

All that said, a lot of people learning to write create long sentences because they don't yet have the skill to communicate with shorter sentences. Demanding that a person break up their sentences into smaller chunks can help them become more skillful - if they put in the effort to learn this.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#237

Post by bo1024 »

buzzcut wrote: post #76

This is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers to help them avoid flabby, purple writing. But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over th…

I thought it was ironic that the first two sentences were very well-written, but highlighted. As if to show an example where the app would be useful. The sentences are excellent and don't need changing.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#238

Post by TheSOB888 »

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…

These tiny sentences (in your version, and in Hemingway's stories) remind me of little children's books (and the alt-comedy storyline from the Martian steampunk shoot-'em-up Jamestown). IMO they appear a little condescending themselves.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#240

Post by bgilroy26 »

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…

Writing a lot of short sentences develops your sense for when a long one is appropriate.
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