After that it was a discussion about this app that led to yesterday's post on gender identification sites.
From the New Yorker:
This week, in the Times, Charles McGrath wrote about a newly digitized collection of ephemera from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, which confirms that the famously terse writer was, as McGrath says, “a hoarder.” Ticket stubs, telegrams, Christmas cards, diary entries—all of it amassed in the twenty-plus years that Hemingway kept his house there. Amid the collection, McGrath identifies two notes that Hemingway had seemingly written to himself, in pencil. One reads: “You can phrase things clearer and better.” And the other: “You can remove words which are unnecessary and tighten up your prose.”
The above paragraph scored an “O.K.” in Hemingway, an app, created by the brothers Adam and Ben Long, which analyzes text and, as it promises, “makes your writing bold and clear.” The program highlights overly complicated words and suggests alternatives (my “all of it” could have simply been “all”). It also calls out adverbs (“newly,” “famously, “”seemingly”), difficult-to-read sentences (the first being “very” hard to read, while the second was just hard), and instances of the passive voice.
“After spending our days writing, we realized a common mistake: sentences easily grow to the point that they became difficult to understand,” the Longs told me on Wednesday in an e-mail. “The worst part is we didn’t realize we were doing it. Our text was more clear and persuasive when we kept it simple.” Adam, who is twenty-five, works in marketing in North Carolina. His brother Ben, twenty-two, is a copywriter in New York. “While complaining about it on the phone, we decided there should be an easy way to help people realize when their writing was too dense,” they said. They collaborated online, with Adam doing the coding and Ben figuring out the writing rules. Hemingway launched in September, and gained wide notice this week after it was shared on Hacker News. The app is free, and the brothers are working, in their off hours, on a desktop version, as well as an extension for Web browsers.
Hemingway uses a formula to judge the “reading level” of a particular selection of writing, which the Longs said is “a measure of how complex the sentence structure is and how big the words you’re using are.” It scored my first paragraph as Grade 14. The app suggests that anything under Grade 10 is a sign of “bold, clear writing.”...MORE