![]() If you listened to everything that Hemingway App told you, it might ruin your writing, too. The Hemingway App would have ruined the books by my favorite authors. I want to be swept away by a compound sentence filled with em dashes and prepositions. Give me Henry James or Leo Tolstoy instead. I find his writing simple to the point of banality. I’m actually not a fan of Ernest Hemingway. “I could see this being a super useful exercise for a writer in the draft stage of a story, to see obvious cuts to flowery/unnecessary language, or to expose potentially confusing sections.” Her assessment wasn’t all negative, however. She found the abundance of short sentences choppy, the app’s aversion to colons unreasonable, and worried it was taking away my voice. “I think my gut reaction is to prefer the original,” Bindrim wrote to me after reading the Hemingway version. In eschewing ornamentation, he ensured that each word he wrote was essential. ![]() Yet, for many adults, his writing still remains profound. But one can write simply while communicating complex ideas. Some of Hemingway’s prose was easy enough for a fifth grader to understand. Writing for readability often means writing at a lower grade level. ![]() Essentially, research shows that long sentences, polysyllabic words, and the passive voice all make it harder for the reader to parse the meaning of a text. (The app wanted me to use “long” instead of “polysyllabic” here, but I resisted.) Most of the recommendations offered by the Hemingway App are based on research into readability-that is, how easy it is to understand a given text. For example, if I write, “This Editor has been used since around 2013,” the words “been used” are highlighted green because I am using the passive voice. When you copy and paste your text into the Hemingway Editor, it highlights sentences with possible issues in different colors and offers suggested changes. The app uses a crude artificial intelligence that recognizes writing problems through natural language processing.
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