Hemingway app - Useful writing tool

Started by Myinah, Tue 18/03/2014 11:11:24

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Myinah

I'm sure many of you have seen this already, but I thought I would post it here for people who haven't.

Hemingway app is a site that basically simplifies your writing. It is not perfect by any means, but attempts to help writers create bolder, more concise prose. Writers all have their own voice and it is best to use your own judgement when using the app, but it has helped me break out of my passive voice a bit more and highlights when my sentences get too complex. Sometimes, complex is needed and right for the individual, but I am often guilty of lengthy, meandering sentences. This has given me an opportunity to assess things objectively, without forcing my friends and family to read my work. Anyway, it's totally free and might help some of us out when writing out game documents and dialogue. :)

http://hemingwayapp.com/

Snarky

#1
I would have more faith in it, even just as a guide, if it actually worked: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416

No computer app is going to be able to parse natural language 100% correctly, but if it has such poor performance at correctly identifying and measuring the metrics it uses to rate your writing, it seems basically useless. (Beyond serving as a prompt to examine certain sentences more closely for potential problems/improvements, which would be useful even if it picked them at random.)

Myinah

I've read all the negative reviews of it, but having used it myself, I personally found it very helpful and think others might too. Not for everything but for passive voice, overuse of adverbs, and complex structures in particular. I'm not saying it makes bad writing good, or repairs broken sentences. I'm saying as one of many tools it can be helpful at highlighting long, complex structures and pointing out excessive use of adverbs and passive voice. For that I have found it very useful, but I would say I am a reasonable writer and was able to make use it along with my own best judgement.

Andail

I'm slightly skeptical toward this kind of very rigid and dogmatic rule sets, but if your main problem with writing is a compulsive overuse of adverbs and extremely long sentences, I guess this can be handy.

I'm also a bit tired of the recent (many decades actually) trend of simplifying everything. These days every style guide I read is basically just about avoiding adverbs, never to use metaphors or similes, make sure there are no redundancies and keep the "fancy" words to a minimum.

Just because Hemmingway wrote tersely and to the point doesn't change the fact that countless other renowned writers have employed a highly flowery and poetic diction.

Snarky

But from the testing, it doesn't seem like it can reliably identify either passive voice or adverbs (on the Hemingway fragments it apparently had a hit rate well below 50%), so... Is it really useful to have a text checker that thinks "The chair is red" and "You are finished in this town!" are passive sentences, and that misses any adverb that doesn't end in -ly?

As Andail says, the belief that passive voice and regular use of adverbs are marks of poor writing is mostly a superstition anyway. Even the writers who have offered such guidelines, such as Hemingway, Orwell, or Elmore Leonard, routinely broke them in their own writing. (Orwell at least gave himself an out by his final rule.)

Myinah

I completely agree. I don't think many great writers would pass the hemingway app's grading system. That's why I think it should be used with the authors best judgement. Maybe a more dynamic word could be used in place of an adverb. Maybe that sentence really is too long and would benefit with shortening. If you have basic ability you should know if a longer sentence works or is needed though. I ignored many of Hemingway's suggestions, but I really did feel my story benefited from changing some of the stuff it highlighted.

It would be boring if everyone adopted Hemingway's style, and silly to follow every suggestion a computer program makes that doesn't actually know what you are writing. It's just an additional tool that can be helpful when used with a bit of common sense.

In my use of the app it didn't make any such errors. So maybe my experience is unique, but I genuinely found it helpful. I am relying on my own anecdotal experience from using it with one essay so I cant speak for the other people's experiences. It's one of those things you would have to try to determine whether or not it was helpful to you. If someone relies on an app to tell them exactly how to write, I would argue they are not really a writer. Again why I stress the importance of an author using their own best judgement and using it as an objective tool. It's not like if you run your text through it, you are then forced to go along with any of it's suggestions lol. I freely ignored many of them knowing that the sentence structure was fine, just above a grade 10 reading level which is what I think app aims for.

Ali

What the hell is wrong with adverbs? Why not try to write with no prepositions?

I feel inclined to design a Mervyn Peake app for people whose writing is too macho and concise.

Andail

I think the strong aversion stems from the fact that most beginners, once they feel they've got a grip on the language, tend to squeeze in hundreds of exciting and diverse adverbs and synonyms to "say" in dialogues, which usually ends up looking rather pretentious.

That's where you get all the "the captain retorted contemptuously" instead of just "said", which literary critics and workshop teachers have learnt to loathe.

Esseb

Without adverbs we wouldn't have Tom Swifty puns, and we'd all be worse off for it.

But yeah, adverb diseases where people try to write anything but "said" is so annoying to read, Esseb said.

Snarky

Quote from: Andail on Tue 18/03/2014 20:46:17
That's where you get all the "the captain retorted contemptuously" instead of just "said", which literary critics and workshop teachers have learnt to loathe.

But is their loathing well founded? Pulling out the first "great author" I find on my bookshelf, Virginia Woolf (The Voyage Out), at a quick glance there's hardly a line of dialog that's reported with just plain "said". From Chapter XIII:

...hailed him twice, 'Uncle Ridley,' ...
'Well?' he asked.
'I want a book,' she replied.
'...' said her uncle, ...
'...?' he enquired.
'...' Rachel stammered.
'...!' her uncle exclaimed.
'...!' cried her uncle.
'...' he said, ....
'...' he demanded, ...
'...' said Rachel, ...
'...?' he asked.
'...' she confessed.


... and so on. In Chapter XIV we even get the dreaded "he said adverbially":

'Shams, all of them,' said Mr. Flushing briefly.

Nabokov seems to be about 50% "said" to 50% other alternatives. It does seem to be true that good authors don't use a lot of adverbs to modify how something was said (they often describe the person's actions or body language instead, or sometimes the underlying thought or motivation for the statement), but in an Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point) I find, on a single page, "concluded rather lamely" and "said Mr. Quarles patronizingly" as well as (introducing dialog) "Mr. Quarles nodded importantly."

Overall, I think it's really just a question of skill and good taste: when a good writer does it, we don't notice â€" so then when a bad writer does it and it sounds silly and overwritten, we think "oh, that's because they used a fancy alternative to 'say' and added an adverb", when it's really just because they didn't do it well.

Babar

I just thought it seemed burdensome to constantly have "said", especially when writing long dialogues. The other option seems to be just having loads of lines one after another in quotation marks, with the assumption that the reader will understand that the speakers are alternating.
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Ghost

I like adverbs and think they are necessary in many places. "Said" is neutral, and in a book you can't see the speaker(s) and clearly NEED to know about their emotion. It's easy to overdo, yes, but following Snarky's example I just took the last book I read, "Something from the Nightside", which is a detective noir novel, and took a few samples. Even the deadpan main character gets his fair share of adverbs, mostly to add impact to the fact that something catches him by surprise.
Adverbs good. Masses of adverbs in one sentence, not so much.

For the fun of it I copy-pasted one of my longer blog posts into the Hemingway'er. I ended up with sentences that no longer made sense, so I may need to clean up my writing a bit ;-D

Weston_Kaunk

#12
I worked with fiction editors for a while. From what I got if there's one thing editors hate more then seeing "said" it's seeing a forced alternative. It's not the word editors have problems with, it's the useage. Said alone is perfectly neutral and when used correctly doesn't draw attention to itself, which is the point. When used incorrectly, as in used repetitively in sentence structure.

He said.
She said.
He said.

It stands out and draws attention to the prose, which draws attention away from the narrative. This is what critics loath, when they're pulled out of the piece. (typically this isn't something we have to deal with because we have visuals as a natural aspect of our prose)

Brilliant examples of correct use like , Virginia Wolf, use a variety of adverbs but ones that are specific to the degree of the moment. Words work through syntagmatic and/or associative relations. Syntagmatic, i.e. deriving specific meaning from the sequence of words it is part of. Or associative, where it is the words specifically not used that derive the exact meaning of the word used. Like, in the story Sam ran across the room. That's what he did so far as plot goes. But for the narrative what he did was more then just "run" because of the situation. In this situation Sam "dashed" across the room. Run is simply linked to a motor function and is fairly neutral on it's own, but "dashed" is associated with many things that make it distinctively different then "ran", and more efficiently convey the situation. Technically it's plenty possible for a writer to tweak the sentence, description, whatever is around their use of "ran" to convey what they mean were they to use "dash", but that's not always always the "economic" way to write. Often writers will need to focus on blocking or description in the scene to really hone the meaning of a few segments, but they still do it with a focus on the associative value of their words. This use and focus on associative value while writing is how minimalists like Hemingway can make such a small amount of text so dense with meaning.

Of course the app wouldn't be bad for comparison, anything that highlights typically passive writing tics are good for doing revisions, but as far as that goes you could just throw the text in wordcounter and highlight how many they/nearly/sort of/almost/kinda/ ect. But that's blind to the narrator's context, like what you want to do with the story. Say you have a character that just has a passive voice and it makes sense for the character in certain moments. You've put that in purposefully, it's suppose to be there. Plus remember you're always writing for an extra character, the present tense narrator. Regardless of what perspective you're writing in they should always fall into the background,first person should only remind the reader occasionally that they're hearing a voice, in third person omniscient the narrator should be completely invisible. The narrator's voice is the prose and the manner in which the story unfolds. It's half the voice in your head as you read and the specific words the writer puts down to make that voice flow smoothly without being noticed. If you give the writing of the narrator's character to a app it might help iron out some of your prose, but you've lost the control of one character in your story, and the most important one at that.
tldr: I say too much
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