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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

#291

Post by qbrass »

acqq wrote: post #88
scotch_drinker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your point is that there are times when breaking the rules is a good thing. No one would argue with that. The problem is that most people have NO IDEA what the rules are for good writing. On top of that, it's easy to slip into overuse without realizing it. I'm a good writer and yet, one thing I'm terrible at is far too many adverbs. They aren't useful when overused. This app helps me see when I have relied to…

Who says that the rules from the app are even right? Anybody acually eveluated them on real books by known good writers? I want statistics: how often good writers are outside promoted rules?

How often are bad writers following the rules? http://imgur.com/nXwdDC6

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#293

Post by kibibu »

omaranto wrote: post #279
aroman wrote: post #68

Earlier 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...

Which Austin did you mean? Jane [1]? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_G._Austin

Stone Cold, presumably.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Stone-Cold-Truth-WWE/dp/1476751684

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#294

Post by kibibu »

krmmalik wrote: post #101
normloman wrote: post #70

Professional writer here. Writing well takes years of practice. If you already write well, you won't need this program. You'll know the rules and the right times to break them. But if you can't put in the time and effort to become a great writer, just using this program can improve your writing a lot.

Glad to see the opinion of an actual professional writer rather than just someone with an opinion for the sake of it. I'm trying very hard to improve my writing at the moment and reading Zinsser's book. I understand what Zinsser is encouraging us all to do, but putting it in practise is over 30 years of un-learning that I need to do so it's not easy. I'm glad that you said the tool is useful because i was having doub…

Can I ask which book in particular?

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#297

Post by Flenser »

agentultra wrote: post #43

For the hackers, I use write-good-mode in emacs to catch passive voice (which is based on some simple shell scripts[0]). I've heard good things about diction-mode, grammar-mode and artbollocks-mode. And of course flyspell. I find emacs very pleasing for writing text. I also use org-mode and it's LaTeX exporter extensively for publishing. Now if only it could integrate with text-fields in my browser... [0] http://matt…

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

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#298

Post by coldtea »

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…

Or "Aim for two or less". It's not a good style to write quantities below ten with digits.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#299

Post by coldtea »

tptacek wrote: post #152
hluska wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Except in any domain where correctness is not black and white.

Re: Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear

#300

Post by unhammer »

kyleburton wrote: post #29

This is very cool. I'd pay $ (5ish) for a couple of other ways to use this: * a bookmarklet that allowed me to select text on my blog or on one of my github pages and analyze it * emacs integration * a command line tool that worked like ispell/aspell to help analyze things I've already written

grep this HN page for emacs and shell, lots of suggestions
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