301–310 of 335 posts
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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.
Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear.
Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors. If you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering logic. Try editing this sentence to remove the red.
Adverbs are blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead.
You can use a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints.
Phrases in green show passive voice.
Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button to compose something new.
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…
That is neat. I pasted in the first part of Big Two-Hearted River [1] and it scored a little "worse" than the first part of the novel I'm working on, suggesting it's not a perfect metric for how "Hemingway-like" a text is. I've always thought that the cultural meme of Hemingway's terseness is not a very good representation of his actual writing style. In the past when I've been prompted to try parodying Hemmngway [2]…
I really wanted to hate it, but couldn't.
I also try to write my code using this style. In fact, code and documentation and email should be:
1. As short as possible: Less words mean less stuff to maintain and comprehend.
2. Simple: The goal in business is to communicate well. Not to impress. And if I haven't communicated clearly, maintaining that code is going to be hard for the next person who has to read it.
Excellent app! This is the writing style my high school composition teacher drilled into my head. Everything I write now is influenced by her. I also try to write my code using this style. In fact, code and documentation and email should be: 1. As short as possible: Less words mean less stuff to maintain and comprehend. 2. Simple: The goal in business is to communicate well. Not to impress. And if I haven't communica…
For the hackers, I use write-good-mode in emacs to catch passive voice (which is based on some simple shell scripts[0]). I've heard good things about diction-mode, grammar-mode and artbollocks-mode. And of course flyspell. I find emacs very pleasing for writing text. I also use org-mode and it's LaTeX exporter extensively for publishing. Now if only it could integrate with text-fields in my browser... [0] http://matt…
I use org-mode for a to-do list and reference/archive. How can it help with publishing?
I can map out my book chapters and sections in a typical tree. I use :noexport: for sub-trees in which I keep notes and errata. Since I use LaTeX I can give my documents some more direct formatting control using #+BEGIN_LATEX blocks (which I have found useful for adding a title page, controlling flow positioning of tables, etc). And I've written a little elisp to hook in some functions which run the texi2pdf program on my exported output automatically.
The nice thing is that I don't have to worry about typesetting until much later. I can just focus on the text, structure and flow. I can have my notes inline. It's really quite a nice setup.
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Does lots of written work in restructed text and would buy as well (a sublime text addon, for example)!
It would be great if there was some way to write Sublime / Vim / whatever plugins that use this.