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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

#321

Post by jimejim »

adam_b_long wrote: post #109

Hey guys, my name is Adam Long and my brother and I created Hemingway a few months ago! Loving the comments here. As many of you pointed out, rules are meant to be broken. Our goal was to fix a simple problem: when you're looking at your own writing for too long, you start missing the simple, obvious errors. You can follow me on Twitter @Adam_B_Long if you're interested in chatting about Hemingway with me.

Cool. I was in the early stages of doing a userscript for gmail to do something like what you have here. All it does right now is filter out specific words/phrases I know I use too much, but I found some scripts that check for passive voice and "weasel words" that I want to incorporate.

This is definitely cool.

You may want to check this out, if you haven't seen it already:

http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#322

Post by sopooneo »

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…

Maybe "more perfect"?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#323

Post by mVChr »

adam_b_long wrote: post #285
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…

OK OK I fixed it ;)

It would be nice to be able to dismiss the error highlighting for certain words or phrases. Or better yet, click on the highlight to change it to a less distracting dotted underline. I like knowing what is unclear or indirect, but sometimes I want to break the Hemingway rules by conscious choice.

(And yes, I used the app to make sure to write this with passing marks.)

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#324

Post by chacham15 »

ojbyrne wrote: post #245
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…

Not to mention that the Chicago Manual of Style recommends spelling out the number "two."

I believe the general rule is that any number which is written with fewer than three words is actually done so.

All the cases listed here: http://writing-style-guide.papercheck.com/~paperch1/index.ph...

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#325

Post by steveeq1 »

oconnor0 wrote: post #311
tptacek wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something is either correct or it isn't, is the point. You might instead write "closer to correct", but, how clunky.

Einstein's theories about the universe are more correct than Newton's. Neither are "correct".

Reminds me of an old quote by George E. P. Box - "All models are wrong, but some are useful"

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#326

Post by TeMPOraL »

agentultra wrote: post #308
Flenser wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use org-mode for a to-do list and reference/archive. How can it help with publishing?

I've been thinking about putting together a blog post explaining how I use it for my book projects... however the short of it is: org-export . 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 titl…

Please do write this post. There's not enough examples of working setups for publishing with org mode; your experience will be helpful to many (myself included).

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#327

Post by grandalf »

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…

Paul is not writing for a 6th grade audience, so it's reasonable that it would not be written at a 6th grade level.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#328

Post by vkb »

ScottBurson wrote: post #264
vkb wrote: post #61

This is a very beautiful and logical interface, but it's the wrong approach, because it's a very developer-centric approach to writing. The problem with writing is you can't loop through it and find whether each sentence passes or throws an exception. A written work needs to be evaluated as a cohesive whole. That's what "bold and clear" writing means to me: a written piece of work that stands on its own and says what…

> one of the most-loved in the English cannon You mean "canon" -- the root of "canonical".

Yes, that would be it. Thank you.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#330

Post by LCDninja »

I bashed a little bit of prose into it for fun ;-)

--- I've always been impressed by Hemingway's writing style. Those long, rolling, complicated sentences transported me to a world where old men still fish; children care about the elderly, and the justice of the universe stands strong against agism. Every dog has his day.

I remember enjoying a long bath on a five-star hotel on the beach in LA, a huge bath, replete with a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" and a little yellow rubber duck. It was then that I learned that my english teacher from years gone by was wrong. Long complicated sentences have their place in the literary world, it's just that they're not for everyone. Like this app.

Some people love Hemingway, and others don't. I happen to love the writer, but an App that highlights beautifully complex sentences that require your full attention to understand: I'm not so sure about. Somebody once said something famous about judging, and that it's not the greatest thing to do. Nixon said that it's better to stand firm on principle and bend like a reed when it comes to matters of taste.

For me, Hemmingway is a matter of taste.

----

This is how I scored in this fun game ;-)

2 of 12 sentences are hard to read. 1 of 12 sentences are very hard to read. 1 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer. 1 words or phrases can be simpler. 1 uses of passive voice. Aim for 2 or fewer.

Interesting.

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