Hemingway desktop app

Never heard of it. Is there a link?

No way, I'm not buying a desktop app to edit. I need to depend upon myself to edit, not a great writer who has been in the writers great beyond and had nothing to do with the invention of this app.

Does it make me eat cheese and drink sangria? Otherwise, I will question its validity.

I kinda like the idea, and it looks appealing, but I do take issue with the notion that complex writing is necessarily bad writing.

I suppose that's why it's called 'Hemingway'. I'd like to see something that does the flat opposite called 'Faulkner'.

There's a simple test for all such software. Find a published short story that has won awards, and received great critical acclaim. Run said story through such software. If this doesn't frighten you away, you're hopeless.

For that matter, Hemingway was not as short and sparse a writer as most seem to think.

Anyway, editing is part of writing, as is rewriting, and no software can do these things for you. Neither can another person, until and unless you already have your work to teh point of professionalism.

MJRevell said:

Has anyone tried this?

Do you recommend it?

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No. Didn't look at it. Don't recommend it. Would never use it. I'm trying to become an author.

I'm reminded of a yarn about an editing program that converted the epigram "Out of sight, out of mind," to "Invisible, unthinkable."

Ditto what Writeminded said.

Tools like this can be useful as long as you understand their limitations and use them intelligently. I've evaluated many of them over the years and likely will give this one a try.

IF it's a good tool (and that's a large IF in my experience) it can help you quickly find low-level problems. These are usually problems you already know you have and routinely find, but the tool can find them quicker. It's rather like a spelling checker in that regard.

The problem with these tools often is that you can't customize them to adapt to your needs. Sentence fragments, for instance, are a useful literary tool. If you're adept at using them but not overusing them, you don't need the tool to point them out. You need to be able to turn off finding this particular problem.

Such tools can't find larger issues, of course. That's where we are better than any machine.

WriteMinded said:

No. Didn't look at it. Don't recommend it. Would never use it. I'm trying to become an author.

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So am I. I use software to help with editing.

It doesn't do the editing for me. And a lot of times I discover the problems it points out are not the problems.

It has caught some, however, that reading again and again didn't show me.

So, maybe I'd use it to supplement my editing process.

That doesn't make me any less of an author.

Laer Carroll said:

Tools like this can be useful as long as you understand their limitations and use them intelligently.

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Exactly.

No. Sorry. I don't rely on crutches. For some reason, things like this and other tools that supposedly improve your writing, or are supposed to be a shortcut to better writing, irritate me.

I do wonder if many of the purist opinions in this thread could reasonably be levied against spelling and grammar checkers?

Of course, the trick to being an author is telling a good story, not necessarily spelling Quetzalcoatl correctly; whether or not using the word 'capitulate' too much is fundamental or peripheral to telling a good story is left as an exercise to the writer.

Shadow_Ferret said:

No. Sorry. I don't rely on crutches. For some reason, things like this and other tools that supposedly improve your writing, or are supposed to be a shortcut to better writing, irritate me.

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It doesn't look like it improves your writing or does shortcuts so much as...just looks like it points stuff out to you that you might not have noticed--overuse of words and wordiness and stuff.

Which is part of what my betas do for me...

Whom I rely on.



Not to say that I recommend this software; I dunno what it is really. Just seems that the function has a useful purpose. *shrug* *hugs betas needily*

Um, well I don't know. Maybe.

Ordinarily I would steer clear of these sorts of things. I don't need or want a piece of software to do my writing for me. It's me against the printed word. Mano a mano. Some days I even write bare-chested whilst drinking wodka.

But ... the editing process is a little different. We actively want and need a second (third, fourth, fifth etc) pair of eyes. Even if they are either dead or made of silicon.

I wouldn't rely on something like this exclusively and I wouldn't edit directly into it. But if it worked well I might be tempted to run it alongside my other editing regimes, including betas, spell checkers, grammar checkers.

A lot would depend on how well it was done, and how useful its suggestions were.

NRoach said:

I do wonder if many of the purist opinions in this thread could reasonably be levied against spelling and grammar checkers?

Of course, the trick to being an author is telling a good story, not necessarily spelling Quetzalcoatl correctly; whether or not using the word 'capitulate' too much is fundamental or peripheral to telling a good story is left as an exercise to the writer.

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I'm not a purist, but editing isn't the same thing as spelling, and deals with a heck of a lot more than grammar. Editing is about judgment. It's about knowing when you need poor grammar, knowing when you need to use the same word fifteen time, knowing when a sentence fragment is the right choice, and how all this works to make a story worth reading.

Editing isn't just about how a sentence is written, or whether a given word has been used too many times, it's about story and character, understanding how all the parts mesh to form a whole that's better than the sum of it's parts . Editing software deals with none of this. It isolates technical details, separates them from story, and in doing so removes all the flavor, all the judgment.

For me, any software that asks for more than a couple of changes to what pretty much everyone out there agrees is a good story is software you can't trust.

i use editing software as a tool for just those technical details. It tells me what things I should rethink, which sentences are too dense, what words don't fit etc. For an ESL author, software like this is invaluable. I use it prior to beta reading.

That said, I checked over this Hemingway app and it doesn't do anything what Pro Writing Aid does already, so I won't buy it.

So, hang on. They're using their own marketing copy to demonstrate how it highlights sentences?

Surely, [don't call me Shirley], if those sentences are too complicated, they have no place in marketing copy - which prizes clarity and simplicity even more than standard fiction writing?

But then, if they're not too complicated, why are they being used as examples? Doesn't that show you that most of your writing will be highlighted unnecessarily?

Or, if they aren't too complicated, and the software actually wouldn't highlight them, then how are we to know whether it actually works?

Jamesaritchie said:

I'm not a purist, but editing isn't the same thing as spelling, and deals with a heck of a lot more than grammar. Editing is about judgment. It's about knowing when you need poor grammar, knowing when you need to use the same word fifteen time, knowing when a sentence fragment is the right choice, and how all this works to make a story worth reading.

Editing isn't just about how a sentence is written, or whether a given word has been used too many times, it's about story and character, understanding how all the parts mesh to form a whole that's better than the sum of it's parts . Editing software deals with none of this. It isolates technical details, separates them from story, and in doing so removes all the flavor, all the judgment.

For me, any software that asks for more than a couple of changes to what pretty much everyone out there agrees is a good story is software you can't trust.

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I guess if that's how you want to look at editing software, this nefarious piece of written code that is looking to hijack all your written prose and turn it into gobblety gook against your free will, then sure, you probably don't want to use it.

Last I used editing software, not Hemingway btw, it wasn't forcing any changes on me at all. It located some things that its simpleminded coding suggested might be problem areas and did me the favor of highlighting them all so that I could take a closer look and make the final judgment of 'do I want this changed or don't I?'

And in the process of reading through to look, found other areas that could use some tightening in the process.

...or am I mistaking the editing process in general, where the writer goes through their work with whatever tools they have at hand (as in, say, oh...the lists of overused words that many writers compile for their own personal use?) and doing the same exact thing only without the fancy color coded highlighting through the entire document?

I have found that editing software has significantly reduced the amount of time I edit by catching the vast majority of the potential problem areas at once for me to go through with a fine tooth comb (don't all writers do this?) and instead of it taking five or six or however many passes it took to catch the vast majority of them, I got them in one go?

That was a winner for me.

Hahaha. I think I just got called a purist.

WriteMinded said:

Hahaha. I think I just got called a purist.

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Well, at least you weren't given an insinuated, back-handed insult of not trying to be an author.

bearilou said:

I guess if that's how you want to look at editing software, this nefarious piece of written code that is looking to hijack all your written prose and turn it into gobblety gook against your free will, then sure, you probably don't want to use it.

Last I used editing software, not Hemingway btw, it wasn't forcing any changes on me at all. It located some things that its simpleminded coding suggested might be problem areas and did me the favor of highlighting them all so that I could take a closer look and make the final judgment of 'do I want this changed or don't I?'

And in the process of reading through to look, found other areas that could use some tightening in the process.

...or am I mistaking the editing process in general, where the writer goes through their work with whatever tools they have at hand (as in, say, oh...the lists of overused words that many writers compile for their own personal use?) and doing the same exact thing only without the fancy color coded highlighting through the entire document?

I have found that editing software has significantly reduced the amount of time I edit by catching the vast majority of the potential problem areas at once for me to go through with a fine tooth comb (don't all writers do this?) and instead of it taking five or six or however many passes it took to catch the vast majority of them, I got them in one go?

That was a winner for me.

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I'm not terribly fond of those lists of overused words, either. Such things are mindless, and mindless never works. Good writing may use teh same word a hundred times. Software tells you not to. So does too much writing advice, unfortunately.

Making the final judgment based on a no minded piece of software is not something I believe works well. I have no doubt there's an exception to everything, and you may be one of these exceptions, but I know very, very few writers are.

Sometimes you can improve writing by going through and removing instances of a word a piece of software, or some piece of writing advice, tells you is overused. But just as often, you can make writing worse this way. Good writing contains too elements, content, and sound. Sound is far more important than any grammatical rule, and excessive word use rule, etc.

It's well and good to talk about your judgment overruling a piece of software, and in your case, maybe it does. But I know it doesn't with the majority of new writers. Not with software, not with beta readers, and not with general writing advice.

I just don't believe good editing works this way. Good editing can't be done in isolation, in a sentence by sentence manner. It has to be done on story level, on character level, on overall mood and tone level, and this means letting some "mistakes" stand, some repetition stand, and it means rewriting sentences, not just "fixing" them.

I think it's very difficult to delete a sentence, or to throw it away and write a brand new sentence, when a piece of software tell you it will be fine if you remove "that", or "just", or "only".

But for me, on top of removing what an editor should be thinking about, it boils down to what this software does to fiction I know is good, or wonderful, exactly as is. When a piece of editing software tells me a two thousand word masterpiece needs more than sixty changes, I have a serious problem with that software.

I ran one of my short stories through one of these editing programs, and it suggested sixty-something changes in a three thousand word story. Here's the frightening part. It was technically correct in every instance. Every instance. It is, I think, extremely difficult for a new writer to ignore suggestions that are technically correct. How can you not follow a suggestion that's technically correct?

But while that software was technically correct in every instance, it was also completely wrong in every instance. Everything it wanted changed was something I'd done intentionally because it made the writing match mood, tone, story, and character. That particular story is my most reprinted piece, the one editors and readers love most, and the one where editors almost always blurb about the quality of the writing.

No human editor has every changed a single word before publishing it. Not a single word. Considering the status of some of these editors, and what they usually do to a story, I find this pretty amazing.

As i said, there are always exceptions, and you may well be one, but exceptions are called exceptions because they are not the norm. Saying they use their own "judgment" to override software, or advice from someone, is, for most new writers, they way they justify taking any action. Too many writers, and editors of start up magazines, do rely on spell check, grammar check, and editing software. They trust what pops out, and the results is disastrous, even when technically correct.

Just a thought, but if a writer has a list of overused words then why would he use them in the first place? As he writes, wouldn't he go, "Oh, right, my 'but' problem. I'll rewrite this to avoid that" instead of waiting until the end to do a search? That seems more efficient to me.

But then, I'm the one who thought "word processors" were like food processors. You'd dump in all the ingredients and the machine did the rest, simplifying the whole process so even non-writers could look good. I was dragged away from my typewriter kicking and screaming when my college courses REQUIRED you to use the computer lab.

NRoach said:

I kinda like the idea, and it looks appealing, but I do take issue with the notion that complex writing is necessarily bad writing.

I suppose that's why it's called 'Hemingway'. I'd like to see something that does the flat opposite called 'Faulkner'.

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Yes, my writing is full of complex sentences and if I put my manuscript through it, the whole thing would be spat out highlighted in red. I don't understand their example. The sentence highlighted in red is perfectly readable to me. Long and short sentences emphasize different things, and at this point I don't think a computer would be able to pick up the subtleties of when a long or a short sentence is more appropriate.

Something that points out 'filler words' might be helpful, but I think most people just use document search for that. If you could add that feature to this and turn off the "difficult sentences" features it might have some use.

does the hemingway estate get royalties ?