What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard.
The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback.
Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art is always going to break all the rules and invert expectations.
This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules!
Calling the app "Hemmingway" brands the app beautifully, and gets people engaged...unfortunately the engagement is jumping all over it for something it was never supposed to do.
I think there's good potential for style linting, it's a really under-explored area. And I think probably the app's rules, as implemented in this alpha, aren't that much up to scratch. You'd at least want to run a POS tagger, and probably a parser, to give better feedback.
So long as the heuristics are _correlated_ with common style problems, you can get some use out of the app. But apparently that's a difficult story to tell.
I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait:
"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."
Programmers write for a living; novelists, reporters, columnists all write for a living. Reporters may be sports journalists, chief reporter and sole editor for a tiny newspaper, famous writer for the Times, or many other fields, each of which have their own standards and needs.
Having said that, computer editing will only get better, until it is used seriously by professionals.
The person who wrote the paragraph you qoute is a journalist. A lot of them are expected to write simple texts. Not all writing is supposed to have the same limits.
I noted that I thought the app's logic probably wasn't "up to scratch" as is --- I'm inclined to be a bit charitable, given the direction of the criticism the app's getting.
I think anyone who brands themselves in such a manner -- namely, to purport to be something they're not -- is a duplicitous, deceitful deceiver, and has no place in honest business. This is the worst outrage since that time I spend $500 on an apple and this punk kid handed me some shiny telephone in a box. I wanted an apple, junior, not some slab of glass and plastic. Your jedi mind tricks won't work on me.
As soon as I saw the app description (it detects passive voice, counts adverbs, long words and long sentences as the bad thing etc) I've expected such results: HemingwayApp grades real Hemingway's writing as "bad."
I applaud Mark Liberman for the tag "Prescriptivist poppycock."
I still wait for somebody to actually pass one whole Hemingway's novel through the app and tell us about the results. Probably the new insights await us, once we analyze the dynamics of the "badness" inside of the real novel.
He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school.
If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quality was kinda mediocre-to-poor.
Dickens, OTOH, is a master of language -- creating long and complex sentences, filled of description and analogy, which have a rich diversity of adjectives and adverbs, creating a descriptive, witty prose.
Well, he is widely regarded as one of the best writers of all time and among other things won the Nobel prize in literature http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/.... Don't mistake brevity for simplicity. Btw, If you are just starting out I highly recommend The Sun Also Rises.
Have you ever thought about the possibility that the Nobel prizes aren't always fully rational or narrowly focused and that there are different motives involved? Hemingway had the novels that widely resonated. Sometimes the writing style or technical details aren't too important when you consider the work as the whole.
The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback.
Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art is always going to break all the rules and invert expectations.
This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules!
Calling the app "Hemmingway" brands the app beautifully, and gets people engaged...unfortunately the engagement is jumping all over it for something it was never supposed to do.
I think there's good potential for style linting, it's a really under-explored area. And I think probably the app's rules, as implemented in this alpha, aren't that much up to scratch. You'd at least want to run a POS tagger, and probably a parser, to give better feedback.
So long as the heuristics are _correlated_ with common style problems, you can get some use out of the app. But apparently that's a difficult story to tell.