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I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
> I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight. Every 4 or 5 years everyone celebrates terse writing like it's new. FTFY.
I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
http://i.imgur.com/K0Mhkse.png
[I'm not snarking, by the way. Just playing with it. It's perfectly okay to have a tool optimized for, say, business correspondence.]
I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that.
More crippling than that, these editors don't support anything besides the writing simplification features. HTML breaks it, markdown breaks it, and it can't do WYSIWYG (Hemingway does this last, but not well).
I don't mean to criticize the tools too harshly: linguistic processing of any kind is hard and they do a good job at that. I can certainly see how this would be useful for someone who writes more seriously than I do and can take the time to write first and mark up or format in a different editor later. And the effort to make it something I would use is large. I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown, and a vim plugin. :)
But for me, not having integration with my workflow makes it too complicated to use and the value it provides isn't large enough for me to change my workflow.
This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
In theory this is a great idea, but not a single implementation I've seen fits my needs. I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that. More crippling than that, these editors don't support anyt…
I was going to recommend Grammarly, it has a Chrome extension, but I think it doesn't support markdown. I use it and I'm happy with it. They have an advanced subscription for 'advanced' linguistic checking and furthermore, the gold service is hiring a human proof-reader. It's interesting.
This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
“He was diagnosed with flu” is passive voice, and appropriate, because the diagnoser is not important. We care more about the flu than the doctor.
“Mistakes were made” is evasive and serves to obscure, and should be avoided.
This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition.
Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject. Both those phrases also meet that condition. Rearrange them and you'l see:
[1] "I was exhuasted" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not seem passive because you've elided the subject, which is part of the problem of the passive voice, it lacks clarity
[2] "Our work here is done" --> "We completed our work" Like the first phrase, this phrase elides the subject of this sentence, the individuals doing the work. In this case, including the subject ("We") may feel repetitive because of the pronoun "our", but its still more precise.
Also, passive voice isn't bad, however it most often lacks clarity. Sometimes that's okay, and sometimes you want some flexibility with your sentences for effect, such as ending a sentence with the subject (one of the primary reasons to use the passive voice).
This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
You sure that's not passive? Exhausted: drained, used up. By what? Sounds passive to me.
