

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear - jmngomes
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Great for testing your copy
======
jawns
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 me can't help but notice that an app
that's intended to help you improve your writing tells you to "Aim for 2 or
less" adverbs, rather than "Aim for 2 or fewer."

~~~
pmichaud
The thing about pedantic snark (less/fewer), is that it loses its teeth when
you're wrong.

Even if you go in for prescriptive grammar, less and fewer were never strictly
divided. The distinction actually came to us through one Mr. Baker's expressed
preference:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less#Historical_usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less#Historical_usage)

~~~
hluska
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 was just
fine to say "less corrections." However, for whatever reason, the upper crust
decided that "fewer corrections" both looked and sounded better. Consequently,
"less corrections" evolved to be less correct. My inner smartass wanted to say
"fewer correct", but that would be a silly joke.

It's like Russian. If you speak French, you can understand many Russian words.
This isn't because French and Russian are linguistic cousins. Rather, it's
because French was the language of nobility and words trickled down.

Or heck, we could talk about the word "you." You was originally formal,
whereas "thou" was more relaxed and informal. Yet, today, if I started a
comment on Hacker News with, "I fear thou are wrong", it would seem needlessly
formal.

To conclude this long mess (it was supposed to be four lines and turned into
paragraphs), language evolves constantly. Though certain distinctions didn't
exist in earlier English, they exist now. However, if you know much about the
history and formation of English, you should be less pedantic. It should also
make us much more tolerant of people for whom English isn't their native
language. We speak an intensely complex language with random rules that apply
in some cases and not others.

Thank heavens we don't have to compile our language before we speak it...:)

~~~
sqrt17
"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 number.

Languages are not random. It's just that prescriptivist get hung up on random
subsets of language and pretend they've seen all of it.

~~~
hluska
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?

~~~
tptacek
Something is either correct or it isn't, is the point.

You might instead write "closer to correct", but, how clunky.

~~~
oconnor0
Einstein's theories about the universe are more correct than Newton's. Neither
are "correct".

~~~
steveeq1
Reminds me of an old quote by George E. P. Box - "All models are wrong, but
some are useful"

------
acqq
I 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 hate to run some
program to tell me "this function has more than 10 lines" or whatever. If I
wrote 500 lines function it doesn't mean it shouldn't be that long: there are
examples where exactly such functions are still necessary and good. Such
automatic evaluations are for managers who probably don't understand what they
enforce. Pointy-haired bosses, if you will.

So I see HemingwayApp as the pointy-haired-editor app.

(Edit: Improving the text based on the human input, thanks Agathos!)

~~~
wmeredith
Hmmm... thanks for commenting, acqq, but four out of nine sentences in your
comment are hard to read. You also used four adverbs, try and aim for two or
less.

~~~
lutusp
> try and aim for two or less.

I hope this was meant as provocation. I'm guessing you actually meant, "Try to
aim for two or fewer," yes?

~~~
crntaylor
It was a reference to the Hemingway app. If you paste acqq's comment into
Hemingway, it suggests "Four adverbs used. Try to aim for two or less."

As humour goes, it's a few levels of indirection away from Seinfeld. But
you're on a forum full of people who spend all day thinking of abstractions
for their abstractions, so what do you expect?

~~~
lutusp
> If you paste acqq's comment into Hemingway, it suggests "Four adverbs used.
> Try to aim for two or less."

Okay, that made my day. :)

------
buzzcut
This is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to
enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers
to help them avoid flabby, purple writing.

But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or
that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There
are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over the other
or vary them for effect. You might be concerned about rhythm, or you might be
attempting to establish a certain tone, distance, closeness, formality, or
lack of.

We have this weird cultural obsession with the clarity, brevity, and
simpleness of writing. Jacques Barzun even wrote a writing manual called
Simple and Direct, as if these are the only virtues to be found in writing.

But I think you want as many tools as possible to achieve the effects you
want. There is a huge rich tradition here, that we've largely lost, a
tradition that teaches about hypotactic and paratactic sentences, that teaches
about periodic and loose sentences, that teaches how to make left and right
branching sentences, that teaches subordination, that teaches rhetorical
devices, and that advocates (at times) longer, more complex sentences for
richer and denser writing.

Thankfully there are a number of books out (some of them) recently that seem
to be fighting back against the austerity view of writing.

They include, if you're interested: \- Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences
\- Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence \- Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences,
Syntax as Style \- Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose

I'd just add, there is nothing wrong with being simple and clear. There is
nothing wrong with cutting out needless or weak adverbs. But there is
something wrong with worshiping the austerity style as, at all times, the best
and the only way to go. There are lots and lots of reasons and occasions to
deviate from it, but the style orthodoxy these days is the one assumed by that
(admittedly cool) website.

~~~
bo1024
I thought it was ironic that the first two sentences were very well-written,
but highlighted. As if to show an example where the app would be useful. The
sentences are excellent and don't need changing.

------
jonnathanson
I'm going to love using this. I write for a living, so I write a maddening
volume of output per week. While I don't absolve myself of the need to edit
everything, I'm working against the law of large numbers. Some stupid errors,
or bad stylistic habits, are going to slip through the net every week.

I've been jonesing for a real-time style editor for years. Autocorrect is fine
and dandy (and often wrong, but that's another story). But most autocorrect
systems limit themselves to spelling and grammar. Hemingway selects for
readability. That's very cool and very useful.

That said, I'm probably not going to copy & paste everything I write into the
Hemingway editing environment. I'd _love_ plug-ins and APIs for Word, Google
Docs, etc. If you make these, I will use them, and I will bug the living shit
out of every writer I know to do the same.

~~~
sitkack
One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence. I have been
mulling an NLTK powered editor for quite awhile now and this PoC is exciting.

But I want to much more!

* Measure for consistent voicing

* Apply arbitrary-ish user supplied rules

* Analyze grammar in sentence structure

~~~
lutusp
> One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence.

It would be nice to have a tool that detects such things, but for the moment,
a detailed editing pass is a good idea. I always edit what I write, indeed
most of the time I'm writing and editing in parallel.

> But I want to much more!

I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated methods
will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's originator.

~~~
sitkack
> I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated
> methods will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's
> originator.

But for a lot of writing this is a good thing, having cohesive writing trumps
losing the voice. It isn't fiction that I think these tools will be useful or
desirable for, it is the mountains of technical writing we are drowning in.

More troubling is the use of automated writing tools for propaganda and
psyops.

~~~
jonnathanson
Agreed. We could point out that, for the last 30-odd years, Strunk and White's
"Elements of Style" has served as the homogenizing cudgel used to beat every
writer's voice into submission. But, by and large, the influence of EoS has
been a good thing. It's helped a lot more people than it's hurt.

Serious and professional writers generally write for two things: clarity and
insight. Stylistic preferences shouldn't stamp out a writer's ability to make
a good point. They should help him express that point more clearly. That's
usually to the writer's (and readers') advantage.

Writers who break the rules, and who know what they're doing, are fine. Most
rule-breakers don't know what they're doing, however. For every David Foster
Wallace, there are a thousand writers who aren't aware they're hard for most
people to read.

~~~
sitkack
Dude, you write good.

------
nswanberg
Paul Graham's writing seems simple and direct to me, so I wondered how the
website would treat one of his essays. Here are the suggestions from the third
paragraph of
[http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html):

"The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to
write in school is that real essays are not exclusively _(only)_ about English
literature. _(Sentence hard to read)_ Certainly _(Adverb)_ schools should
teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the
teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature.
And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team
with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in
fashion, or what constitutes _(Forms, makes up)_ a good dessert, but about
symbolism in Dickens. _(Sentence very hard to read)_.

This is given a "readability" score of grade 14, which I suppose means it can
only be deciphered by college sophomores or above.

I wondered how it would read after being rewritten to achieve a perfect score
in the site, so I took a stab at it:

"In school students write essays about English literature. But real essays can
be about many more things. Schools should teach students how to write. But due
to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed
together with the study of literature. All over the country students are not
writing about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the
Yankees. They are not writing about the role of color in fashion. They are not
writing about what makes a good dessert. They are writing about symbolism in
Dickens."

The result brings me straight back to my days of taking standardized tests,
where the test had a snippet of some essay, and was followed by questions on
the topic. There was information in those snippets, but very little tone. It
could be a bad attempt at my part, but while the information remains in my
version, the tone is gone--I can no longer smell the air of Cambridge in that
writing.

~~~
JasonFruit
I don't think Hemingway could breathe at Cambridge.

~~~
nswanberg
The real Hemingway or the website? I was hoping someone would explore the idea
this tool could remove elitism, since I haven't made up my mind on that (I
think Paul's version is much more pleasant to read). I guess this is a start.

Thinking along those lines, has anyone put Jeff Atwood's writing into this
thing? He's an extremely effective communicator to large tech audiences, and
my guess is that he should have a more readable score on this thing than Paul
would.

~~~
pjmorris
Challenge accepted. I grabbed the text of 'Why Does Windows Have Terrible
Battery Life?'[1] and fed it to Hemingway. Grade 10 readability.

[1][http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-
ha...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-
terrible-battery-life.html)

------
normloman
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.

~~~
krmmalik
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 doubts about it
after seeing the other comments. Im going to use it to assess my next blog
post and see how things pan out.

Thanks for the tip.

~~~
normloman
That's a classic book!

~~~
e12e
Easily the best book on writing I've read. Closely followed by some research
from the 60s on "process oriented writing" (I'm not sure if that's the
accepted English term -- the material I read was in Danish). They essentially
say the same thing: writing is re-writing -- and in that light, any tool that
encourages you to look at what you've written again, and rethink it one more
time, should help improve your writing.

[edit: Hemmingway himself has allegedly said "The first draft of anything is
shit." \-- but at least wikiquote has it as unsourced, so I'm not sure if the
attribution is correct -- even if the idea probably is]

------
pistle
For 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.

~~~
diydsp
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 the capabilities of
machines.

[1] [http://grammarpartyblog.com/2012/01/17/use-versus-
utilize/](http://grammarpartyblog.com/2012/01/17/use-versus-utilize/) [2]
[http://writing.wikinut.com/Writing-Tip%3A-Use-and-Utilize-
ar...](http://writing.wikinut.com/Writing-Tip%3A-Use-and-Utilize-are-Not-the-
Same/1c4q0-bs/)

~~~
ivan_ah
> _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.

~~~
diydsp
While the second reference was for Merriam-Webster, the first was for Oxford.
So if you really want go against BOTH of those dictionaries AND
english.stackexchange [1], you'll be making yourself deliberately obtuse. You
might want to glance at the Cambridge American English Dictionary as well
[2][3].

Can you not loosen your grip on this opinion in the face of evidence? Is it
clear to you that people make dictionaries so that we can communicate more
efficiently, get more done, understand one another better and improve our
experience on this planet, not to be fancy? I'm telling you this because in my
dream, this is a website of people helping each other achieve the goals of
their lives and details like this may help you, too. I enjoy it when people
bring me fresh clarity. I'm not trying to beat you into a pulp until you agree
with me.

[1] [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19811/using-
utili...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19811/using-utilize-
instead-of-use) [2] [http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-
english/...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-
english/utilize) [3] [http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-
english/...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-
english/use_1)

------
adam_b_long
Hey guys, my name is Adam Long and my brother and I created Hemingway a few
months ago!

Loving the comments here. As many of you pointed out, rules are meant to be
broken. Our goal was to fix a simple problem: when you're looking at your own
writing for too long, you start missing the simple, obvious errors.

You can follow me on Twitter @Adam_B_Long if you're interested in chatting
about Hemingway with me.

~~~
jimejim
Cool. I was in the early stages of doing a userscript for gmail to do
something like what you have here. All it does right now is filter out
specific words/phrases I know I use too much, but I found some scripts that
check for passive voice and "weasel words" that I want to incorporate.

This is definitely cool.

You may want to check this out, if you haven't seen it already:

[http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-
voi...](http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-
words-duplicates/)

------
vkb
This is a very beautiful and logical interface, but it's the wrong approach,
because it's a very developer-centric approach to writing.

The problem with writing is you can't loop through it and find whether each
sentence passes or throws an exception. A written work needs to be evaluated
as a cohesive whole. That's what "bold and clear" writing means to me: a
written piece of work that stands on its own and says what it means.

Computers are not smart enough yet to understand why "Lolita, light of my
life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue
taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.
Lo. Lee. Ta." is a complete, perfect paragraph. It doesn't have a verb and it
looks like Lola is misspelled multiple times, so it doesn't pass the subset of
grammar rules set up in the backend. But the meaning, the essence of the
paragraph is clear.

Writing may someday be able to be governed by algorithms, but not yet. I ran
the second paragraph of David Copperfield through Hemingway [1], and it gave
me too many adverbs, a misspelling of the British neighbourhood, and the use
of passive voice. This is understandable, as Charles Dickens was a verbose
writer who got paid by the word. And yet, it doesn't detract from the fact
that he is one of the most-loved in the English cannon.

We can't measure good literature yet, because there is no straightforward
formula, and although this is an interesting attempt, it can't teach good
writing better than a human.

For a better, and still technical, approach to understanding how and why
sentences and paragraphs work with us or against us, it's better to read
Strunk and White, and even better to read "How Fiction Works" by James Wood.

If there is a way to incorporate at least those two books into conditional
statements, I would be excited to see it.

[1] [http://imgur.com/k9hsHfj](http://imgur.com/k9hsHfj)

~~~
ScottBurson
> one of the most-loved in the English cannon

You mean "canon" \-- the root of "canonical".

~~~
vkb
Yes, that would be it. Thank you.

------
Duhck
I love this, and I love your test for the desktop version.

One suggestion, make the price a slider from $0->$100 and instead of asking
"Would you pay $5 for a desktop version of Hemingway? It would add the ability
to save and open text files." ask "Please suggest a price for the desktop
version"

This will give you a better idea of the true value of the application to
people without being suggestive.

Awesome idea and implementation!

~~~
jaysonelliot
Also a big fan of the "desktop version" test, because it is triggered by the
action of a user trying to get the desktop version as opposed to thinking they
are about to answer a poll.

To that end, I wouldn't trust the data you would get if you asked people to
state what they would be willing to pay. Self-reported data out of context is
notoriously unreliable. Instead, really put it to the test. Tell people that
you'll develop a desktop version if enough pledges are received, and ask
people to make a binding pledge in advance. Give them a discount for jumping
in early, of course, but use the average pledge as a guideline for final
pricing.

If the median pledge amount is, say, $10, then you could probably assume that
people would be willing to pay $15 once the product was actually available for
download. (Those are made-up numbers, but you get the idea.)

------
munificent
I think people are reading a bit too much into the name, and into the feedback
the app gives. I don't think it's "get rid of all the pastels and your writing
will be like Heminway's", nor do I even think "get rid of _all_ the warnings"
is what it's trying to do.

It _is_ useful for a writer to throw some text at it and see what you can
learn. More feedback is almost always better for writers. The trick, is
always, is having the judgement to incorporate intelligently.

For example, I stumbled onto a book about procedural content generation in
games[1]. As a writer, game programmer, and dedicated fan of roguelikes, if
this book were any farther up my alley, it would be banging against the back
fence.

But, ugh, when I tried to read it, I just gave up after a few paragraphs. It's
not gibberish, but it's almost physically painful to wring the actual
information out of it.

And, indeed, when I throw some of those paragraphs at this app, I see:

    
    
        Paragraphs: 1
        Sentences: 31
        Words: 833
        Characters: 4196
        11 of 31 sentences are hard to read.
        11 of 31 sentences are very hard to read.
        10 adverbs. Aim for 0 or less.
        10 words or phrases can be simpler.
        13 uses of passive voice. Aim for 6 or less.
    

If the authors took a bit of advice from this app, they'd end up with a better
book. That sounds like a win to me.

[1]: [http://pcgbook.com/](http://pcgbook.com/)

~~~
whatsreal
I would venture that the problem with pcgbook.com is not the quality of
writing, but the fact that most of the authors are not native english
speakers. They seem to be mostly Dutch or at least living in Copenhagen.

~~~
tormeh
Ahahaha! How many textbooks have you read? How many American ones? The
majority of them suck. Wikipedia can usually be counted upon to be clearer.
And the more academic the books are, the more they suck. Actually, I would
guess that how often the words "I", "you" and other personal pronouns
referring to the author and reader appear in a book would be a powerful
positive predictor of the book's quality.

Sure, being non-native doesn't help, but the world of academic writing has
far, FAR bigger problems than that.

------
agentultra
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.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-
voi...](http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-
words-duplicates/)

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

~~~
agentultra
I've been thinking about putting together a blog post explaining how I use it
for my book projects... however the short of it is: _org-export_.

I can map out my book chapters and sections in a typical tree. I use
:noexport: for sub-trees in which I keep notes and errata. Since I use LaTeX I
can give my documents some more direct formatting control using #+BEGIN_LATEX
blocks (which I have found useful for adding a title page, controlling flow
positioning of tables, etc). And I've written a little elisp to hook in some
functions which run the _texi2pdf_ program on my exported output
automatically.

The nice thing is that I don't have to worry about typesetting until much
later. I can just focus on the text, structure and flow. I can have my notes
inline. It's really quite a nice setup.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Please do write this post. There's not enough examples of working setups for
publishing with org mode; your experience will be helpful to many (myself
included).

------
lhnz
Well, this is great.

But it's missing something.

If I'm to learn how to write clearer, I will need to use this more often.

Could they create an API and a chrome addon?

Ubiquity is the killer feature of any communication tool.

~~~
myth_drannon
I suspect they are using
[https://languagetool.org/](https://languagetool.org/) as a back-end, at least
for some parts of the grading. LanguageTool has chrome addon and a public API.

------
splitbrain
The source of this would be useful to integrate such features in other apps
(like editors). An API might do as well at least for online tools like blogs.
As a standalone site it's too much hassle to integrate it into your daily
workflow I think.

~~~
natdempk
Making this an API that WordPress, Draft, Ghost, and other writing platforms
could pull in would be awesome. Maybe you could add plugin support or
something for people that want it integrated into their blog/cms?

------
jaimebuelta
I like the idea of the app, but I'm not totally sure this kind of "review"
will be very useful.

The problem is that, in some cases, you need complex sentences , passive voice
or adverbs. And that means that a perfectly fine article won't be pristine. I
had a similar problem when facing syntax correctors that show a lot of
warnings. Yes, they help you make less mistakes, but they also give falso
positives, which can be distracting. I want to clean up and get to zero
errors, after all.

So, this can reduce your writing to be "too conformant".

Man, writing is hard :_(

~~~
chadwickthebold
I thought the same thing on first glance. However, maybe the use case for this
is rather to filter entire blocks of solid color text. One complex (red)
sentence every now and then is perfectly fine, but I would rather see a whole
paragraph of them, say 4 or so in a row, as a problem.

~~~
jaimebuelta
I just cannot stand having "errors" highlighted in red, so my tendency will be
to feel bad for not correcting every one. It breaks my heart to see compiler
warnings, even if I know that those specific ones are ok... Maybe is just me,
but it will be conflicting for me, and potentially not useful...

------
aneisf
I'm reminded of a story[1] I heard on NPR the other day. Researchers have
drawn correlations between writing style and the eventual onset of
Alzheimer's. Apparently nuns who had a habit of writing verbose, idea-dense
sentences were less likely to develop Alzheimer's later on.

[1]:
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1272118...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884)

------
CalRobert
This saddens me. I appreciate clear writing as much as anyone, but are we not
denuding our language if we attempt to describe everything using short
sentences and a small lexicon? I hate reading James Fenimore Cooper as much as
the next person (including, notably, Twain), but surely there is a place for
complex ideas expressed with a rich vocabulary and nuanced structure.

~~~
CalRobert
And no adverbs?!???? That's just ludicrous. I modified an adjective with one
right there. I regret nothing!

~~~
anExcitedBeast
To be fair, "just" rarely adds any value.

"That's just ludicrous." vs "That's ludicrous."

Reads pretty much the same.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I can't work out whether or not you're being ironic, but by the same token,
"To be fair" and "pretty" are needless filler too. (In case it's not clear, I
disagree with your premise!)

------
k-mcgrady
I like this. I pasted in some text from a blog post I'm working on. All the
edits it suggested made the post much better. I was worried that through the
suggestions it might take the personality out of a persons writing, but
because not all the suggestions are explicit (e..g change this word to this
word) that might be avoided.

------
bergie
Awesome! I think it would be great if editors could help users to not only
format their contents, but also to write better.

Another idea in sort of similar direction is doing automated link suggestions:
[http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/automated-
linking/](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/automated-linking/)

------
pathdependent
I like this app. However, most of my work Latex based. If you had something
like this for Sublime Text, I would buy it.

~~~
serverascode
I think I would too. I like the idea. Not sure about calling it Hemingway,
because I am a huge fan of the writer, but I would like to have something like
this available for Sublime.

It might have to deal with markdown.

~~~
SyneRyder
Another vote that I would like this within Sublime (although I'm not sure how
that would work), and would really like for the tool to be able to interpret
Markdown. Right now it gets confused by the markup for hyperlinks.

Looks like a great tool for me to take rambling blog drafts and trip them down
while editing/refining.

------
wpietri
Neat! I just pasted in a chapter from a book I may or may not be writing. It's
a useful experience. It definitely pointed out some things that could be
better.

However, it's wrong a lot of the time. I'd encourage you to add a little
explanatory note for people less confident in their writing. Something about
how no computer is a substitute, they should make the final decisions, etc.
It'd also be great to have a feature where I could bless particular sentences.
Good editors make useful suggestions, but they also know to let marginal
things go if the author disagrees.

Also, two minor bugs: any paragraph after multiple blank lines gets entirely
highlighted in red. And you shouldn't capture the control-tab keystroke and
convert it into a tab character. Every time I try to leave that window, I end
up mangling my text.

------
aresant
Several years ago at conversion voodoo we studied the impact on conversion of
writing at an 8th grade reading level which is about the average American.

It, of course, improved conversion and it turns out there is already quite a
bit of algorithmic work on the topic to help tune your ad copy.

So I am a believer in the hypothesis that simplicity and clarity, in marketing
anyways, is a worthwhile pursuit.

I am going to test this Hemingway along the same lines - take some longer form
copy, run it through and test output.

(1) [http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increasing-
site...](http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increasing-site-
conversion-by-writing-for-an-8th-grade-reading-level/)

------
Blahah
Neat. Along the same lines for emacs people, there's writemode-good
([https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-
mode](https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode)), and for Sublime Text
there's Writing Style
([https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Writing%20Style](https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Writing%20Style)).

Also, heads up that the site layout is not responsive: viewing at ~800px width
places buttons all over the left side of the screen in an ugly way.

------
kelmop
Nice! I love good quality code: [http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-
doubleup-obf.js](http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup-obf.js)

~~~
halfdan
I especially like how easy you can guess the non-obfuscated version:
[http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-
doubleup.js](http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup.js)

~~~
veb
"The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or
is temporarily unavailable." :-)

------
hluska
I like products like this, though English is a notorious pain in the ass to
try and write, so I thought I'd try it out.

In good news, this app does a good job of handling complex sequences. Consider
the sentence:

 _The quick, brown fox ran out of the clump of trees, saw us, got scared, and
promptly ran back into hiding._

When I typed that, I expected it to turn red, but it didn't. Great job!

However, there is a problem with identifying adverbs. Consider the sentence,
"He is a burly man." In this case, though burly ends with -ly (like adverbs),
it is an adjective.

------
andralamoosia
This is an interesting idea, and kudos to the founders for the start, enmity
to passive voice notwithstanding. Good writing is hard. Things that help are
welcome. And good for them for trying. It does seem a bit rough, still, though
. . .

I wrote a book chapter recently -- as a last minute favor for a friend, and
gratis. I did my best to make the words sing -- the subject's a yawner for
most people, and I had to entertain myself while writing the thing. In
addition to sly references to whatever caught my fancy that day, I quite
deliberately used contractions all through. More music in 'em I reckoned and
they scanned better. Some genius editor sent a markup back all de-contracted
and I had to spend a day adding them back in. Cursing.

It is really, really hard to write well precisely because so much depends on
context. It's true in professional writing too -- you have to keep your
audience in mind. True that adjectives are less persuasive, usually, than
facts stated slyly, but see how those sibilants sounds aloud? Maybe it's my
taste and not yours, but maybe that's the point of a hemmingwayapp -- you
could always joyceify it or send it throughout iambify.com and set it to my
wild irish rose.

I'm sure Stanislaw Lem's great piece the Electronic Bard has been posted in
the past but for those who don't know it and want the last word on
wordsmithing machina, check it -- goo.gl/zZD0pX . Warning -- don't read this
while drinking anything or you will risk snorting soda pop out your nose.

------
captainchaos
This is really nice. I said I'd by $5 for a desktop version but I'd pay $10
for a Chrome extension that could work on selected text or (even better) the
Gmail compose text box.

------
RogerL
I think the concept people are reaching for is the idea of false positives and
negatives. Yes, if you have a bad sentence there is a good chance it will
highlight it. But, perhaps not (false positive). Similarly, it will flag many
perfectly fine sentences not pitched to 7 graders (false negatives).

Here is text I more or less randomly chose from MOMA's site. Almost all of it
is graded as "very hard to read".

Where is the cutting edge of the motion picture? Discover it first at MoMA.
Building upon the Museum's long tradition of exploring cinematic
experimentation, Modern Mondays is a showcase for innovation on screen. Engage
with contemporary filmmakers and moving image artists, and rediscover landmark
works that changed the way we experience film and media.

Any edit I make to that paragraph that makes the app happy seems to diminish
the text.

In contrast, my first paragraph is graded better than the MOMA text, yet I
think it is worse. The one thing it did complain about were the adverbs
'similarly' and 'perfectly'. The former is required to draw the comparison;
the second is perhaps redundant, but I am emphasizing to make a point -
redundancy is as much a tool in writing as it is a crutch or error.

I'm not saying the app is useless, just take the output with a huge grain of
salt. Heck, if I paste text from Hemingway it is a sea of red and yellow.

------
LCDninja
I bashed a little bit of prose into it for fun ;-)

\--- I've always been impressed by Hemingway's writing style. Those long,
rolling, complicated sentences transported me to a world where old men still
fish; children care about the elderly, and the justice of the universe stands
strong against agism. Every dog has his day.

I remember enjoying a long bath on a five-star hotel on the beach in LA, a
huge bath, replete with a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" and a little
yellow rubber duck. It was then that I learned that my english teacher from
years gone by was wrong. Long complicated sentences have their place in the
literary world, it's just that they're not for everyone. Like this app.

Some people love Hemingway, and others don't. I happen to love the writer, but
an App that highlights beautifully complex sentences that require your full
attention to understand: I'm not so sure about. Somebody once said something
famous about judging, and that it's not the greatest thing to do. Nixon said
that it's better to stand firm on principle and bend like a reed when it comes
to matters of taste.

For me, Hemmingway is a matter of taste.

\----

This is how I scored in this fun game ;-)

2 of 12 sentences are hard to read. 1 of 12 sentences are very hard to read. 1
adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer. 1 words or phrases can be simpler. 1 uses of
passive voice. Aim for 2 or fewer.

Interesting.

------
kablamo
Excellent app! This is the writing style my high school composition teacher
drilled into my head. Everything I write now is influenced by her.

I also try to write my code using this style. In fact, code and documentation
and email should be:

1\. As short as possible: Less words mean less stuff to maintain and
comprehend.

2\. Simple: The goal in business is to communicate well. Not to impress. And
if I haven't communicated clearly, maintaining that code is going to be hard
for the next person who has to read it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The slowest processor in the room is the wetware between our ears. Shorter,
simpler code is easier to write, read, understand, communicate, remember.
Halve the code, get a 32X improvement!

------
hafabnew
Neat!

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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index)
(uses 4.75 instead of 4.71 .

~~~
adam_b_long
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).

~~~
hafabnew
Was not meaning my comment as a slight to you at all, it's a very cool app
you've got here. Best of luck with it!

------
magicroundabout
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 in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
([https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm](https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm))

I find it quite surprising that detection of cliches and needless multiple-
negatives are not common features of word processing software.

~~~
dllthomas
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992)

------
yock
I love it.

One thing though, I don't want another text editor. This is a feature, not an
app, and I want this to integrate into my existing workflow. I don't know if
that is a web service for integration with popular editors, integration with
things like Editorially, or something else, but I really don't want to open
yet another app to edit things.

------
Tycho
Hemingway's writing is incredible, IMO. And the theoretical reasons he had for
writing in that style are very convincing.

However it leaves one massive problem. If this is the 'one true way' or
writing fiction, so to speak, then nobody else can really embrace it because
they'll be dismissed as Hemingway wannabes.

------
philmcc
My advice: on the "would you pay $5 for a desktop version", after the yes,
offer to save their email for when it's ready. I probably (adverb) would've
given it to you.

I'm not sure that I'll remember to _come back_ and look for it.

------
valvoja
I like the app and I think the easy to remember name suits it well, even if
Hemingway might turn in his grave. It's a promising start, but I'm not sure if
I'd continue to use it unless I could start tracking improvements in my
writing.

I would love to see a bit more of the hard data behind the rankings. For
example, I just tested a blog article I wrote 5 minutes ago against an article
written by a proper journo on PandoDaily and I scored higher. Does that make
me a better writer? I hope not.

In all seriousness, the idea has a lot of potential and you could certainly
find a few nice ways to compare yourself different writing styles of famous
authors Hemingway or someone else.

------
Mz
I have a question about the app itself:

I grew up in a bilingual home. My mom is a German immigrant who spoke no
English when she met my American father. So in spite of having a good
education and getting high praise for the content I produce, I find that I
often write in "Germish." I need help with spelling, punctuation and grammar.
The technical aspect of my writing is shockingly only fair to middlin' at
best, sigh.

Spelling help is not hard to find but punctuation and grammar help is hard to
find. So how helpful is it with that stuff? Because it looks like it focuses
on tone or something, not basic grammar per se?

Thanks.

------
Trindaz
This might help bloggers write copy, but it's definitely not good for writers.
The first paragraph of Chapter 1 of Robert Hughes' Shock of the New has these
stats according to Hemingway:

5 of 12 sentences are hard to read. 2 of 12 sentences are very hard to read. 2
adverbs (he should be aiming for "0 or less"). 0 words or phrases could be
simpler*

*this "could be simpler" feature might be a bit ambitious. If you're confident in telling me that the entire text is essentially too complicated, it seems contradictory that at the same time none of it could be made more simple.

------
DanielBMarkham
Thanks 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
sentences in the space afterwards. You might create long, difficult-to-read
sentences punctuated with short declarative ones.

Wonder how this tool is going to know any of that?

~~~
adam_b_long
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.

------
Camillo
I thought it was a problem that 50%* of college freshmen read below a 10th
grade level, but apparently the problem was with college graduates writing
above it.

(*: number made up because I can't be bothered to look it up.)

------
RyanMcGreal
Fixed:

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear.

Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors. If you see a
yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red
highlight, your sentence is so complicated that your readers will get lost
trying to follow its meandering logic. Try editing this sentence to remove the
red.

Adverbs are blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead.

You can use a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints.

Phrases in green show passive voice.

Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button
to compose something new.

------
kriro
I wonder if you could get a negative score by pasting some translated Kant :P

Pretty cool, might use it as a quick checkup tool, would pay the 5$. Any word
on what happens to the pasted text? I can't find any terms of use.

Could be really useful if you could change the rating rules. I'd like to adapt
it to academic texts for example. There's some use beyond style as well since
you could automatically check for superlatives (or adjectives in general) and
the like that are generally not wanted and some other typical constructs that
should be avoided.

------
aymeric
This is great.

I struggle with correcting my use of passive voice and I wish there were
suggestions.

For example, how would you rephrase this? "put some headphones on to reduce
the odds of being interrupted by someone."

~~~
penguindev
Wear headphones so you aren't interrupted. Wear headphones to reduce
interruptions.

IANAEM (not an english major)

Actually, is your original even that bad? I though passive would be
"Interruptions are reduced by you wearing headphones."

------
csense
I hated Hemingway in high school. His writing style is really mediocre. When
reading A Farewell to Arms, if it wasn't for the fact that it was a
professionally published and bound book, I would have thought it was an
amateur attempt at fiction writing from one of my high school classmates --
and one of the weaker writers at that.

I couldn't stomach his writing style for an entire novel, so I ended up not
finishing the book.

I would like to see someone make a similar website to guide you toward writing
in the style of Charles Dickens.

------
happy4crazy
If you'd like to read a deep investigation into writing styles, let me suggest
Clear and Simple as the Truth[0]. Steven Pinker discusses the book in a fun
talk on communicating science[1].

[0] [http://classicprose.com/](http://classicprose.com/) [1]
[http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-
technol...](http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technology-
in-the-21st-century-steven-pinker-12644/)

------
Wistar
I like and use Writer's Diet which seems quite similar and has been around for
a few years.

[http://writersdiet.com/WT.php](http://writersdiet.com/WT.php)

------
dllthomas
In addition to the unfair maligning of the passive, I note that the following
(simplified from a line in
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922))
is not marked as passive despite being so:

 _" This example will go unidentified as passive if you trust bad grammar-
checking programs."_

The problem is never the passive _per se_ \- it's unclear writing, period.
Sometimes that involves passive voice.

------
davidw
I tried it out on a few articles from PG and the Economist. It turns out
complex sentences are common in their writing. I don't mind, or should I say
that it is not minded?

------
Houshalter
Pasting "best" HN comments in I get:

Grade 10, Grade 6, Grade 11, Grade 14, Grade 14,

And copy and pasting the whole page gets me Grade 9 (and some serious bugs
([http://i.imgur.com/U6sK1mM.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/U6sK1mM.png?1)) which I
think may have crashed my browser.)

"New" HN comments:

Grade 12, Grade 7, Grade 7, Grade 5, Grade 7,

And the whole page is Grade 8

My own comments apparently have a lot of unreadable sentences but they aren't
that bad. (this comment is Grade 3! Yay.)

------
rnprdk
A fun contrast to this would be kottke.org's "Growing Sentences with David
Foster Wallace" from a while back: [http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-
with-david-foster-...](http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-
foster-wallace)

Also: I haven't read a whole lot of Hemingway, but when I did read him, I
always thought he was much more versatile a writer than made out to be.

~~~
lutusp
> I haven't read a whole lot of Hemingway, but when I did read him, I always
> thought he was much more versatile a writer than made out to be.

Remember that Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and many other
writers began as newspaper reporters, where over time they learned to express
complex stories with the fewest words.

------
OoTheNigerian
Brilliant!

I am wondering if it may be better and/or more profitable to license the
Hemingway algorithm to be used in the dozens of writing applications via a
Chrome/browser app initially I would suppose (starting with Google Docs up to
Poetica, Penflip, Draft etc.)

The value proposition I assume is the suggestions and recommendation. Focusing
on that instead of customer acquisition/user interface design for another
writing app may be more rewarding.

Great job all the same.

------
fegu
I am impressed with the result of this. I spent some time on the source code
(after deobfuscating it). The analysis done on the text is quite simple and
fairly limited. Kudos on the convincing result nonetheless.

Just a small note: looking at the source code almost made me look over my
shoulder, there is about 30 different situations being reported to Google
Analytics as events. The makers of this _really_ knows how you are using their
product.

------
dasmithii
This could be the future of stylistic education in literature. If a tool
existed to generate rules for this editor to follow, aspiring students could
practice the writing styles of famous authors.

Of course, serious writers shouldn't model themselves after others. More
specific areas would be the focus. Narrower subjects like technical writing
might be promising, since they aren't particularly dependent on individuality
in style.

------
pvsnp
It would be awesome if a "weasel words" highlighter or filter were to be added
too. I have found that just removing some of these words from writing tends to
have significant improvement in the clarity of writing.
[http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-
voi...](http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-
words-duplicates/)

------
cell303
This is great for writing scientific articles, manuals, tutorials, text books
and the like. I'll start using it right now :)

However, as far as literature is concerned, I'd not be using it. The title is
misleading in that respect. Something along the lines "simple", "clean",
"focused" writing would be better.

BTW: I have to paste some page-sized sentences from Thomas Pynchon in there.

------
jhonovich
I found this quite useful. I could see myself using it regularly as a Chrome
extension similarly to how I use grammarly lite currently.

------
dataking
Very cool! I wish it would come with an API to integrate into text editors
(Sublime Text, Emacs, Vim, etc.)

Shameless plug: Some time ago I authored a Sublime Text (2/3) plug-in that
highlights use of passive voice and "weazel words" (i.e., words to use
sparingly and words). To install from Package Control, just search for
"Writing Style" :)

------
cjg
I think very few people would actually like using a desktop version, because
it breaks your workflow.

Anyone who is prepared to hand over money for something like this ideally
wants it integrated into their current writing environment, be that Word,
LibreOffice, Scrivener, Dark Room or whatever.

Plugins are the way to commercialise this (if that's at all possible).

------
moron4hire
There is nothing wrong with the passive voice.

~~~
normloman
It's not technically wrong, no. Nobody will accuse you of having bad grammar.
But every good writing style manual warns against using it. Because the active
voice is clear, bold, and more concise. There are only a few situations where
writers should prefer the passive voice.

~~~
rnprdk
Many "good writing style manual[s]" are kind of full of it.

An interesting bit from the wiki(1) on passive voice: "For example, despite
Orwell's advice to avoid the passive, his Politics and the English Language
(1946) employs passive voice for about 20 percent of its constructions."

As with anything, it's important to be aware of what you're doing. But back
when I tutored people in writing, hard-and-fast rules like this resulted in
awkward, contorted writing by scared students. For example, I once knew a very
smart person who avoided predicate adjectives at all costs. I don't really
blame him for confusing passive voice and predicate adjective. I even found
cases where the Hemingway app confused the two. But it was too bad that he had
been so thoroughly brainwashed against the passive. Though I kind of admired
how he managed to avoid, for years of his life, what I think is an
indispensable construction.

1
-[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Advice_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Advice_in_favor_of_the_passive_voice)

~~~
normloman
I haven't had the experience of tutoring anyone in writing, but I'd like to.
And I agree, that you can't place too much importance in style manuals ...
they can give contradictory or just plain stupid advice. But good style
manuals do more than set rules - they explain why the rules are there, and
even highlight exceptions where breaking the rule is appropriate. They are
indispensable for improvising your writing, provided you don't treat them like
rulebooks. Read a few, then form your own opinion.

Now, unlike a style manual, Hemingway doesn't explain the reasoning behind
rules, or permit breaking the rules in the right context. It's limiting, and
won't produce beautiful writing. But I suspect it will have use for non-
writers. I'm talking about people who write imcomprehensibly, and don't have
any incentive to master the art of writing. Doctors, lawyers, and business
executives come to mind. In my experience, people in these careers write like
shit and don't have time to improve their writing. By adhering to these rules,
they can improve their writing significantly without much effort. The result
will still be somewhat awkward and contorted, but far less than what they
would write otherwise (marketspeak / legalese).

------
imranq
This is great, I can definitely see myself using this for long texts. What
about having modes for different historical authors: Austin, Dostoevsky,
Woolf. Who said that Hemingway was the golden standard?

Although I have to admit Hemingway's famous short short story (though possibly
not his) gives me chills

"for sale, baby shoes, never worn"

~~~
gruseom
That wasn't Hemingway. The first recognizable version was by William R. Kane.
Never heard of William R. Kane? Me neither; hence the Hemingway. Quotes always
bond to the nearest plausible famous person.

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-
shoes/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/)

------
taternuts
This seems pretty cool - though the display could use some work (I don't know
if this is just me, on Chrome). It's overlapping in a lot of places, the
buttons seem a bit wonky, and the spacing is weird
([http://i.imgur.com/bNqI9MD.png](http://i.imgur.com/bNqI9MD.png))

------
cdonnellytx
Interestingly it marks the infamous Zero Wing intro as grade 3 or 4, but
considers the "correct" translation to be Grade 6 and complains about the "all
of" they use.

[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zero_Wing](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zero_Wing)

EDIT: Forgot HN isn't Markdown.

------
mbillie1
"Why do we drive on the parkway, but fetishize an impossible and ridiculous
masculinity on the Hemingway?"

------
MichaelTieso
Ohhh. Well done! Already sending this to a bunch of writers in my group. This
would be killer as a WordPress plugin.

------
vipworld
Top scores in readability with these dramatic, bold, and above all, clear
adjustments:

"Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear.

Hemingway shits on your long sentences. Fuck complexity.

Smack an adverb with blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead.

You can insert a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for
hints.

The passive voice sucks."

------
boh
What is the benefit of using this? Is it to write well? According to this
system Marcel Proust, Edith Wharton and George Eliot are terrible writers. Is
it because they didn't write proper blog posts or tweets? "Bold and Clear"
doesn't mean good or intelligent.

------
aytekin
One of the best product names I have seen in a long time!

\- People who are interested in being a (good) writer get excited when they
hear the name. The name suggests they might write well like Hemingway.

\- The name is already familiar and impossible to forget.

\- It creates a lot of controversy and discussion as seen in this thread!

------
kyleburton
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

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

------
egh
All you need to know about this idiocy is that it rates actual writer's work
(including Hemingway) as bad:

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

Don't use this. Just don't.

------
kolo32
Try to paste the Gettysburg Address.

"Four score and seven years ago..." \- the sentence is very hard to read.

"all men are created equal" and "we are engaged in a great civil war" \-
passive voice.

And so on...

The moral is that you should not trust an automatic tool to judge your writing
style.

------
the_unknown
This is quite the fun tool. I know web apps are all the rage but really would
love to see this implemented as an MS Word plugin - I'd be far more likely to
use it on an ongoing basis if it were integrated directly into my editor of
choice.

------
im3w1l
I made a small greasemonkey script for google drive integration :). It adds a
button to the documents toolbar.
[http://pastebin.com/cw1hHcC5](http://pastebin.com/cw1hHcC5)

------
piyush_soni
That's good and helpful, but I don't know why it would suggest me to replace
"All of" to "All" in this simple sentence below: "All of you please stand up.
"

Any answers by English experts?

~~~
ScottBurson
I agree, that's a strange suggestion.

Clearly this program cannot be trusted absolutely.

------
colig
I like it. Is the grade level calculated with Fleisch-Kincaid?

$5 is a reasonable price (to me) for a minimal text editor with this feature,
though I would prefer something meatier and more expensive along the likes of
Scrivener.

~~~
adam_b_long
We use the Automated Readability Index:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index)

------
enemtin
Dear whoever made Hemingway: Can you please make a Wordpress plugin?

I would love you forever.

Yours in gratitude,

------
gtirloni
Looks interesting. As an wannabe writer, I was checking the AP Stylebook but
the price is prohibitive right now.

[http://www.apstylebook.com/](http://www.apstylebook.com/)

------
NeoWang
Interesting, I opened Chrome Dev Tools and start violating some rules, but see
no network traffic to the server. Is this purely implemented with js? With
dictionaries loaded initially?

------
gaussdiditfirst
Great idea, I can think of many ways this sort of app could be extended to
improve sentence structure via a number of other heuristics you might find
mentioned in a grammar book.

------
sehugg
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but are there any feature differences from the
grammar checkers available in word processors since the 90s? (besides being on
the web, I mean)

------
imdsm
Found a bug: type in
"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"
and watch the highlighting break.

~~~
DanBC
Please edit this to include a line break, or include 4 spaces at the front of
the line.

You've fucked page layout for mobile users.

------
im3w1l
Bug report: If I mark the text in the textbox and drag and drop it in the box,
the dragged text is displayed on top of the text already there. It looks very
bad.

------
heraclitus23
Any famous writer's style should stand for a "filter" that anyone can apply to
a text. I'm waiting for the Instagram for text editors.

------
gregf
I would love to have something like this as a vim plugin.

------
ARothfusz
Seems like a good tool to help with documentation, where long complex
sentences can lead readers astray, and passive voice hides important
information.

------
YPetrov
It'd be interesting to paste a typical cover letter in the app and see how
much crap one has to write nowadays to get to the interview stage. :)

------
hoggle
I often really like long sentences, also when reading. This constant trend
towards conformance is one of the more annoying trends of our times.

------
throwaway344
I feel this would be more interesting as a bookmarkelet to parse web pages.
Like the Simple English Wikipedia but everywhere on every page.

------
tlack
What a great and simple idea. Make it an API, please, and don't forget the
history function so I can see how text evolves over time.

------
sanj
I wonder if this could help with comments:
[http://xkcd.com/481/](http://xkcd.com/481/)

~~~
usrusr
Isn't [http://xkcd.com/1133/](http://xkcd.com/1133/) a lot more relevant to
hemingwayapp?

------
km3k
I'd love to see this as a firefox extension.

------
christiangenco
I'm in love with this. I wish it was a plugin for Ghost[1].

1\. [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

------
BHSPitMonkey
You should add a warning class for possible misspellings, too. It would be
nice to not need to use a separate spell checker.

------
rodolphoarruda
I'm using this tool to review the English versions of my resumés. It's been a
very interesting experience so far.

------
melipone
It does not work for technical papers but if I am struggling with forming a
sentence, I'll certainly keep it in mind.

------
higherpurpose
Can we see this as a Wordpress plugin, too? Or a Chrome extension for
Wordpress (the way Grammar.ly works for example).

------
adregan
Who will make the Faulkner? It highlights your sentence red if it doesn't go
for at least a page and a half.

------
baddox
The funny thing is, I found the yellow and red sentences in their description
to be sufficiently bold and clear.

------
fnordfnordfnord
This should be a plugin that replaces the standard spelling/grammar checker in
word processing software.

------
bhartzer
Wow, this is great. I now have a tool to put all my writing through before I
finish an article. Very cool.

------
wsinks
Another question - do we know who made this app? I'm curious as to the
security of their servers.

------
nomadcoop
I would love an API to this so I can integrate it into Storytella, the writing
app I'm working on.

------
preemrust
Nicely done. It would be nice if they can licence the idea to the makers of
other simple writing apps.

------
awkwit
I'm running all my blog posts through this now just to find any low hanging
fruit improvements.

------
mjhea0
love this. contact me if you're interested in adding this to a markdown app.
:)

michael [at] mherman [dot] org

------
mmaunder
YES!!!! As someone who loves writing but wasn't an english major, this
rocks!!! Thank you.

------
auganov
Love the concept. I'd pay monthly if it did more complex analysis. But not at
this stage.

------
rbonvall
Apparently the sentence "my telly is red" has an adverb and uses passive voice
:P

------
moondowner
If you make a desktop version (that works offline as well), I'm totally buying
it.

------
seancoleman
I'm tempted to reply to long, low signal/noise ratio emails with this.

------
bobzimuta
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7224386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7224386)

I'd like to propose the bobzimuta constant: The first 40% of any HN comments
on a page can be skipped since they will likely only be pedantic circle-
jerking.

------
mpeg
I'd definitely pay for a Chrome addon or desktop version of this.

------
ahussain
I pasted in some David Foster Wallace text and it exploded.

------
beloch
I'd love this as a plugin for emacs or notepad++.

------
stevewilhelm
Would pay $5 for a Sublime Text Plug-in version.

------
LeicaLatte
I will make a chuck palahniuk app someday.

------
zsiciarz
I wish for a H.P. Lovecraft app like that.

------
randomflavor
Can I plug this into gmail?

------
maknz
Public API, please!

------
Kumquat
Please make one for ee cummings now.

~~~
normloman
one for make ee cummings, now please

~~~
datashaman
use d punc tu a tion

f a i l

------
FeinKrepp
Melikes

------
BenjaminN
Love this!

------
glibgil
When I edit, your app should give me a unique url that is chained to the
original. I can't send someone a link to what I have edited. How did I do?

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear.

Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors. If you see a
yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red
highlight, your sentence is dense and complicated. Your readers will get lost
trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic. Try editing that sentence to
remove the red.

Adverbs show in helpful blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force
instead.

You can use a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints.

Phrases marked in green show a passive voice.

Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button
to compose something new.

------
cwaniak
Now what you need to do is to automate this process. User pastes the text and
there is a magic auto-fix button that will shorten the sentences, make
everything more readable, etc. And then charge per 24hrs the button is
enabled.

------
squirejons
The coder opened his IDE. The IDE was on the screen of his monitor. The IDE
was colorful in the dimly lit room. The coder opened his can of Red Bull. He
drank once from it and put it down. Then he placed his fingers on the keyboard
and began coding. It was PHP code, and it was good. He typed into the night
and early morning. He got up and went to bed. He felt good. He did not think
about the woman that night because he was tired. That was good, too.

------
Fasebook
Yes, I would $20+ dollars for a desktop version, that didn't suck at what this
is supposed to be doing.

------
I_am_Doge
wow

so app

such writing

better than mcirosoft word

~~~
taternuts
HN is the last place that needs novelty accounts

