

Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test - route66
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/02/hemingway-takes-the-hemingway-app-test.html

======
syllogism
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 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.

~~~
egh
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](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-...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/02/20/being-an-adverb/)

and on adverb hunting via software:

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004271.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004271.html)

and on this app:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416)

~~~
patrickphilips
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."

~~~
CapitalistCartr
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.

------
ivan_ah
Way to go Adam
([http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long](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...](http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-press/) [2]
[https://github.com/languagetool-
org/languagetool/blob/master...](https://github.com/languagetool-
org/languagetool/blob/master/languagetool-
core/src/main/java/org/languagetool/rules/LongSentenceRule.java)

~~~
gabemart
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.

------
meepmorp
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](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416)

~~~
acqq
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.

------
csense
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 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.

~~~
pewallin
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/...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/).
Don't mistake brevity for simplicity. Btw, If you are just starting out I
highly recommend The Sun Also Rises.

~~~
acqq
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.

------
JacobAldridge
I am reminded of a cafe I walked past in Spain, possibly Toledo. Above the
front door a sign declared "Ernest Hemingway never ate here".

~~~
pjmorris
I have a feeling Mr. Hemingway would approve.

------
midgetjones
Hemingway'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...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tragedy.html)

------
kelvin0
I'm glad to this important headline is still on HN after all these days!

