Hemingway Can Make You a Better Writer
Can a heartless computer make you a better writer? We already have autocorrecting editors, spelling checkers, and grammar checkers. A new online tool called Hemingway goes a step farther, and will help you write like Papa.
It works.
Simple like a rowboat, Hemingway the app flags words and constructions that Hemingway the man would not use. It tells you if your sentences are too long. It flags the passive voice. And it pops your adverbs right off the page. So you can bury them like the poisons they are.
An example of my own writing. Could be better.
It turns writing into a game. A clean screen with no highlights: Good. A page full of highlights and flags: Bad. You want clean. Clean is good.
This story is good. No flags.
If you want science, the site will also give your work a grade level score. It uses what appears to be a standard rating system.
You can write on the Hemingway site itself or paste that dreck you wrote elsewhere into it. The site will save your work to Word files. The team is exploring the business sense of creating an actual desktop app. I hope they do it.
That’s more like it.
Reach the author of this story, Rafe Needleman, at rafeneedleman@yahoo.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @rafe.
