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Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

newyorker.com

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Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

#11

Post by acqq »

meepmorp wrote: post #3

For a slightly less tolerant review of the app's behavior (generally, and on Hemingway specifically) check out Mark Liberman's take here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416

As soon as I saw the app description (it detects passive voice, counts adverbs, long words and long sentences as the bad thing etc) I've expected such results: HemingwayApp grades real Hemingway's writing as "bad."

I applaud Mark Liberman for the tag "Prescriptivist poppycock."

I still wait for somebody to actually pass one whole Hemingway's novel through the app and tell us about the results. Probably the new insights await us, once we analyze the dynamics of the "badness" inside of the real novel.

Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

#12

Post by patrickphilips »

egh wrote: post #5
syllogism wrote: post #4

What 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/…

I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait:

"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."

Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

#13

Post by acqq »

pewallin wrote: post #8
csense wrote: post #7

Why 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.

Have you ever thought about the possibility that the Nobel prizes aren't always fully rational or narrowly focused and that there are different motives involved? Hemingway had the novels that widely resonated. Sometimes the writing style or technical details aren't too important when you consider the work as the whole.

Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

#14

Post by acqq »

patrickphilips wrote: post #12
egh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait: "The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places w…

The person who wrote the paragraph you qoute is a journalist. A lot of them are expected to write simple texts. Not all writing is supposed to have the same limits.

Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

#15

Post by gabemart »

ivansavz wrote: post #2

Way 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-gui…

That was also my first thought. A real achievement for this kind of launch.

I would be super, super interested to hear some rough stats for referral traffic if they founders would be willing to share.

Re: Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

#18

Post by CapitalistCartr »

patrickphilips wrote: post #12
egh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait: "The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places w…

Programmers write for a living; novelists, reporters, columnists all write for a living. Reporters may be sports journalists, chief reporter and sole editor for a tiny newspaper, famous writer for the Times, or many other fields, each of which have their own standards and needs.

Having said that, computer editing will only get better, until it is used seriously by professionals.

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