Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Want to Write Like Hemingway? There’s an App for That.

There’s more to Ernest Hemingway’s prose than brevity, clarity and active language. But those are the things that Hemingway App will help you with. In other words, it’s a fun starting point on an edit, but it won’t make you a literary genius.

That said, Hemingway App is awesome and has an interface so simple and easy to use, it might have been designed by the master himself.

Dump a chunk of text into the online editor and get a grade score as well as easy to parse advice on how to make the sample cleaner and more clear. The (editable) sample text you encounter when you go there also explains how it all works:
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 dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
Adverbs are helpfully shown in blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead.
You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints.
Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice. 
Paste in something you're working on and edit away. Or, click the Write button to compose something new.
Strictly speaking, HemingwayApp isn’t an app at all. That is, don’t look for something you can use on your phone: it doesn’t seem to work that way. Rather, at the moment, it’s all done online, in your browser window, though a downloadable desktop version is on the way.

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