It seems pretty useful as a tool for spotting the kind of linguistic howlers that tumble out on first draft. I can see this sort of thing becoming more valuable when more advanced Natural Language Programming APIs become available. It would be cool to see an attempt to encode Orwell's rules from Politics and the English language: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing…
Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
131–140 of 335 posts
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree! The Hemingway mode at seems to be geared (ironically) at technical writing. My English teacher wouldn't like it — it encourages simplification of language and minimization of word variation. Sometimes it's good to write like Austin...
That's what I noticed. It seemed to mark your writing higher the lower the reading grade level it was targeted at. I didn't realize that writing at a 5th grade level was the pinnacle of writing. What is with it's fear of adverbs?
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.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#133I believe the logic behind HemingwayApp is misguided: Hemingway the writer actually wrote long sentences and they were actually important in his writing. Passive is also important in good writing. You can't use machine metrics to force "good writing" you can only enforce mediocrity and the following some random rules "because the rules have to be followed." Likewise, I as a writer of the software would absolutely hat…
The passive voice has its place. But sentences in the form, "x is something that is y," are difficult to defend. Just write "Passive is important in good writing." (Even worse: https://twitter.com/Graham_LRR/status/387778330054774784 )
The point is not whether passive voice has a place in good writing, it's to make young writers aware of the difference between active and passive voice, and when each is appropriate (or "strongest").
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#134You 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…
>> Aim for 2 or fewer. This also violates current usage conventions for handling numbers in text.[1] Figures are only meant to be used in greater numbers (a rule of thumb is anything over 30, but I think I read that in a David Foster Wallace text, fwiw) with more complex verbal / textual representations - that is, not "two". [1] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/593/01/
Yeah the harping on "fewer" vs. "less" and completely ignoring the "2" bothered me too. In my time as a newspaper writer (long ago), the general rule of thumb we used was once you hit 13, switch to numbers. Of course, newspapers have different priorities regarding space, so I could understand if this rule is different for other forms of writing.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#135You 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's funny, because I tried your comment in Hemingway and it came out with a much better score after I erased every letter of it.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#136Neat! From their JS: readinglvl = getReadingLevel(paragraphs, sentences, words, chars); [..] function getReadingLevel (p, s, w, c) { var r = Math.round((4.75 * (c / w)) + (0.5 * (w / s)) - 21.43); return r; } So it's a slightly modified http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index (uses 4.75 instead of 4.71 .
That's right. We're using ARI, mainly because it's a much simpler algorithm since it doesn't require identifying syllables. As you can see in the code, my programming skills are pretty weak, so ARI was an easy choice. This was my first non-trivial programming effort (I'm a marketer/product manager, not an engineer).
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#137For presenting utilize as a wasteful term, I want to tearfully hug everyone involved in this. Please kill 'utilize.' We should reach out to stakeholders and incentivize the sunsetting of the leveraging of the word 'utilize' from all slide decks. Slide decks - the (not) new version of the tri-fold foam presentation board. It's the clear binder of our age.
Utilize has a rightful place in the English language. [1][2] Just because so many people misuse it, doesn't mean it should be ghettoized. Remember a few days ago when an article suggested that we may be shaping our lives according to the capability of machines and there were many naysayers? People nixing a perfectly useful word because a machine can easily recognize is a perfect example of us accomodating our ways to…
> Utilize has a rightful place in the English language. [1][2]
Neither of the these articles make a very strong point. Just because the Merriam-Webster felt this "use for unintended purpose" connotation doesn't mean it's true. I'm still of the opinion that "utilize" is completely useless---it is simply the French verb for "to use."
The use of "utilize" in English is a classic "wanting to be fancy by using the French word" syndrome.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#138Thanks for posting this! I've been struggling to write my first novel, and I'm interested to see how I score with this. Of course, when you're writing, many times you break the rules. At times grammatically incorrect dialog, for instance, scans better. You might leave a subject off a sentence, make the reader hunt around for it. You might make some sentences difficult in order to contrast them with freely-flowing sen…
You're right that short, declarative sentences aren't always better. But, our goal in building this tool was to just provide a few simple algorithms for catching things that you might miss after staring at a piece of writing for too long.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#139I would love to have something like this as a vim plugin.
Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear
#140Earlier 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…
Sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say.
If you're specifically talking about my use of "more correct", let me try another example of why I think "more correct" is useful nonsense. I'm Canadian. Therefore, I use spellings like "colour" and "honour".
However, if I'm writing something primarily targeted to Americans, I switch to honor and color. It isn't that colour becomes incorrect when I write for an American audience. To me, color is always wrong. But, if I want to influence an American audience, color will be the correct spelling they're looking for.
When I'm obsessing over edits, especially when underlying rules are unclear (or non-existent), shades of correctness are the best metric I can find. Do you have another?