In theory this is a great idea, but not a single implementation I've seen fits my needs.<p>I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that.<p>More crippling than that, these editors don't support anything besides the writing simplification features. HTML breaks it, markdown breaks it, and it can't do WYSIWYG (Hemingway does this last, but not well).<p>I don't mean to criticize the tools too harshly: linguistic processing of any kind is hard and they do a good job at that. I can certainly see how this would be useful for someone who writes more seriously than I do and can take the time to write first and mark up or format in a different editor later. And the effort to make it something I would use is large. I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown, and a vim plugin. :)<p>But for me, not having integration with my workflow makes it too complicated to use and the value it provides isn't large enough for me to change my workflow.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.hemingwayapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hemingwayapp.com/</a>
I’m an admirer of the writing of George Orwell so I thought it would be fitting to paste the first two paragraphs of his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”.<p>It suggested removing a number of <i>modifier phrases</i>. These phrases were not redundant and removing them would result in loss of important detail, information and/or emphasis. In some cases removing those words would result in nonsensical or syntactically incorrect sentences. Further experimentation showed that it complained about “mostly” and “many” as modifiers but not “some”.<p>It highlighted a number of <i>long noun phrases</i> but none of these could be suitably shortened, and Orwell’s uses of the passive voice were mostly appropriate; re-phrasing these to be in the active voice would result in awkward prose. Its <i>left branching sentences</i> were not rambling at all.<p>On the plus side, I thought its highlighting of <i>long sentences</i> worked well but not all long sentences are difficult to parse and a succession of multiple short sentences can have an unnatural rhythm. It also failed to take into account that colons and semi-colons can be used to separate main clauses.<p>I wouldn’t use it myself, but I can see how it could be a useful tool for considering how a sentence can be rephrased and encouraging awareness of the issues it highlights.
This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416" rel="nofollow">http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416</a><p>Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
"Four score and seven years ago..."<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/K0Mhkse.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/K0Mhkse.png</a><p>[I'm not snarking, by the way. Just playing with it. It's perfectly okay to have a tool optimized for, say, business correspondence.]
I say it is interesting. It's from the same guys from 'Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences'. AFAIK, here they are implementing automatic summarization, aided presumably by the accuracy of their parser. I signed up and I look forward to trying it.
The variable pricing is pretty interesting. In one session I got $1, $3 and $5, while another gave $5, $12, and $20.
$5 felt like a good deal considering what I pay annually for Grammarly. I'd be curious what their average is.
Reminds me of this:
<a href="http://www.hemingwayapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hemingwayapp.com/</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243</a>
Is there no beauty in painting vivid pictures through
colourful expression?<p>Sure, being terse makes consumption faster and easier, but don't you trade<p>that for the tool of directing the reader's imagination?<p>I guess the skill is in being terse yet still descriptive?