Being Ernest

For those who don’t know, Ernest Hemingway was the author behind such classic novels as For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. To say his style of writing has been influential over the years is an understatement. He is renowened for his use of short, clear, easy to read sentences. His philosophy was as simple as his writing style:

‘Write the best story you can and write it as straight as you can.’

(E. Hemingway)

I know that I’ve found that a pretty difficult skill to master. I have commented in the past that I have a penchant for long-windedness. Unfortunately, lengthy or complex sentences can be frustrating to read and easy to misunderstand. That’s a sure way to put your reader right off. That’s where the Hemingway Editor, created by Adam and Ben Long, comes in.

There are, of course, millions of apps out there designed to help writers. There are specialist text editors, plot generators… I even found an app that ‘Rickrolled’ me if I stopped writing! But the Hemingway Editor stands out for me as something quite unique. It will help you improve your writing style by highlighting:

Any long or complex sentences
Fancy word choice, where something simpler would suffice
Adverbs
Passive voice

The great thing about Hemingway Editor is it does not fix your writing for you. That would be cheating. It would also be unlikely to work. But like all good teachers, it forces you to improve your style by marking and grading your work. If you have been using fancy words, it will suggest simpler alternatives, a bit like a spell-checker, but that’s where the interference ends. It’s up to you to change (or not change) your style accordingly.

The grading system is simple to understand… if you’re American. It works by telling you what grade of the American school system your reader would need to be in to have a reasonable chance of understanding your work. As I write this now, the Hemingway Editor is telling me that I am writing at a level someone in eighth grade would understand. As a British person, I’ve no idea what that means, since we use a different system but that’s nothing Google can’t help with. Besides, it’s not really necessary to know. The grade is displayed on a simple gauge that even a baboon could understand and is colour-coded to indicate how well you are achieving your goal of simplicity.

For those of you who are interested in the technical details, according to the Editor’s own help document,

‘Hemingway judges the “grade level” of your text using the Automated Readability Index. It’s a reliable algorithm used since the days of electronic typewriters.’

So there you go.

If I had to pick one feature of the Hemingway Editor I don’t like, it would be the spell-checker. To be blunt, it is inferior to most other spell-checkers I have come across. The main problem is that it seems to struggle with identifying what word you were trying to spell. For example, earlier on in this post I misspelt ‘influential’ as ‘influental’ (I should add that this was a typo; I know that’s not how you spell it). Hemingway Editor spotted the error but could offer no suggestions as to what it should have been. OpenOffice, on the other hand, gave me no less than seven possible alternatives for the same error and Scrivener gave me five. Also, if you don’t speak English, you can forget about checking your spelling with Hemingway. The spell-checker only seems to only work for Australian, British, Canadian and US English. While it is possible to disable the spell-checker, I am left wondering if the other features would work any better in different languages.

One other problem: it doesn’t seem to be entirely bug free, as you can see from this screendump. I’m not 100% sure, but I think that bug came about as a result of me copying and pasting text into Hemingway Editor from OpenOffice but I could be wrong.

Additional features of the Hemingway Editor include:

Basic text formatting, such as bold, italics, bulleted lists, indentation, etc.
Letter, character, word, sentence and paragraph count, as well as an estimation of the time required to read your document.
Import and export to and from Microsoft Word.
Export as HTML or Markdown.
Toggle between ‘write’ and ‘edit’ mode. Using ‘write’ mode allows you to write without the app checking your work for you. When you’re ready to edit, you just toggle to ‘edit’ mode to see it highlighted in a million different places.

The Hemingway Editor is available as a desktop app for Mac and PC. It will set you back $9.99 (that’s £7 on this side of the pond), which isn’t too bad. However, before you get your wallet out, I’d recommend you go to www.hemingwayapp.com. There, you’ll be able to use almost all the app’s features for free, so it’s maybe worth trying it out that way before you fork out your hard earned money for this useful (but not quite perfect) little app.

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