Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
newyorker.com
Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
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Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#2Way to go Adam (http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long) for getting covered in The New Yorker!
If it is no secret: did you get in touch with them or did they seek you out? Did you have a press kit[1] ready, or was this done on the fly?
I'd also be interested to hear about the technology you're using, and how it compares to the pattern-based approach of LanguageTool, e.g.,[2].
[1] http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-pre... [2] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master...
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#3For a slightly less tolerant review of the app's behavior (generally, and on Hemingway specifically) check out Mark Liberman's take here:
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#4What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard.
The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback.
Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art is always going to break all the rules and invert expectations.
This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules!
Calling the app "Hemmingway" brands the app beautifully, and gets people engaged...unfortunately the engagement is jumping all over it for something it was never supposed to do.
I think there's good potential for style linting, it's a really under-explored area. And I think probably the app's rules, as implemented in this alpha, aren't that much up to scratch. You'd at least want to run a POS tagger, and probably a parser, to give better feedback.
So long as the heuristics are _correlated_ with common style problems, you can get some use out of the app. But apparently that's a difficult story to tell.
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#5What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard. The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback. Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art i…
These language features are not correlated with style problems. There is no evidence that they are. These are folk remedies for bad writing.
On the passive voice, see: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 and many, many more articles on that blog.
On adverbs:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/02/20/being-an-...
and on adverb hunting via software:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004271.h...
and on this app:
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#6What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard. The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback. Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art i…
These language features are not correlated with style problems. There is no evidence that they are. These are folk remedies for bad writing. On the passive voice, see: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 and many, many more articles on that blog. On adverbs: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/02/20/being-an-... and on adverb hunting via software: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/…
Yeah, I'm well familiar with languagelog.
I noted that I thought the app's logic probably wasn't "up to scratch" as is --- I'm inclined to be a bit charitable, given the direction of the criticism the app's getting.
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#7Why do people want to emulate Hemingway's style?
He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school.
If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quality was kinda mediocre-to-poor.
Dickens, OTOH, is a master of language -- creating long and complex sentences, filled of description and analogy, which have a rich diversity of adjectives and adverbs, creating a descriptive, witty prose.
I've never understood why people like Hemingway.
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#8Why do people want to emulate Hemingway's style? He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school. If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quali…
Well, he is widely regarded as one of the best writers of all time and among other things won the Nobel prize in literature http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/.... Don't mistake brevity for simplicity. Btw, If you are just starting out I highly recommend The Sun Also Rises.
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#9Hemingway's most important rule is difficult to parse for a web app:
"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tr...
Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
#10What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard. The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback. Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art i…
I think anyone who brands themselves in such a manner -- namely, to purport to be something they're not -- is a duplicitous, deceitful deceiver, and has no place in honest business. This is the worst outrage since that time I spend $500 on an apple and this punk kid handed me some shiny telephone in a box. I wanted an apple, junior, not some slab of glass and plastic. Your jedi mind tricks won't work on me.