Let Ernest Hemingway edit your writing ?? with an algorithm
Source: calebgarling

Papa relaxing (Wikicommons)

You may recognize the passage to the right. It’s from For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and as you can see, I’ve turned it over to an editor that was liberal with the red pen. The editor notes that this sentence is far too long, uses a questionable adverb (“smally”) and even has two ambiguities (“all of”).


And actually, the editor is Hemingway himself, who while alive stressed that the keys to strong prose include writing with clear sentences, removing adverbs and avoiding the passive voice, among others. Here, he’s taken his own prose to task ― or at least an algorithmic interpretation of Ernest Hemingway has taken Ernest Hemingway to task.

This is a submission to HemingwayApp. Paste in any text ― Hemingway’s, a Chronicle article or or your own ― to the website and the site spits back the readability and transgressions of Papa’s rules. Ben and Adam Long put the site together entirely with front end JavaScript ― now free but indicating payment could come soon ― and has existed quietly until it blew up on Hacker News today.

Of course, the edits above are ridiculous. That sentence is exquisite, perhaps perfect. And actually the suggested edit highlighted in green (“was red”) misunderstood the mention of a color as passive voice.

These notes should be dismissed. Yet, people constantly look for ways to improve their writing ― the site has been spreading across Twitter and Facebook, partially because of the prestigious (playful) claim, but also because it does deliver benefit. Though it isn’t perfect, flagging pointless adverbs and confusing sentences will at least start helping people who ― insert frustration with modern education here ― never learned strong written communication in school.

Even for people who do a lot of writing, it’s still a great reminder tool. For fun I pasted in a random article I wrote about bitcoin ― not a simple topic ― and found all the edits quite helpful. I used the passive voice five times, each of which could have been flipped to the active if I’d taken the time. It highlighted three adverbs, all of which could have been nixed. And the descriptions of how bitcoin works could all have been made clearer. Great edits.

Yet the implications of the site still make us feel uncomfortable. The only true rule of writing is that there are no “rules” in writing. So distilling instructions into computer code for a machine to be an editor gets pretty tricky. At this point in its development, always heeding the edits of HemingwayApp will yield boring (and dystopian) prose. Winding sentences, adverbs and the passive voice do have their place ― just not a prominent one if you want humans to enjoy your work.

True edits take into account the entire body, not sentences in vacuums. Though people often think of Hemingway’s brevity, sentences like the above can be found throughout his work ― lyrical knockout punches, set up by rhythmic jabs of short sentences. That context, that rhythm, that emotional enjoyment we derive from a graceful shift in pace and resolve is far harder to teach a machine. Perhaps Hemingway’s greatest lesson was that people should write with true empathy. For now, that capability in a computer appears a long way off.

So in the meantime someone needs to write an app that teaches people how to drink a bottle of rum and survive a bar fight.