What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Way to go Adam (<a href="http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long</a>) for getting covered in The New Yorker!<p>If it is no secret: did you get in touch with them or did they seek you out? Did you have a press kit[1] ready, or was this done on the fly?<p>I'd also be interested to hear about the technology you're using, and how it compares to the pattern-based approach of LanguageTool, e.g.,[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-press/" rel="nofollow">http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-pre...</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master/languagetool-core/src/main/java/org/languagetool/rules/LongSentenceRule.java" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master...</a>
For a slightly less tolerant review of the app's behavior (generally, and on Hemingway specifically) check out Mark Liberman's take here:<p><a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416" rel="nofollow">http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416</a>
Why do people want to emulate Hemingway's style?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I've never understood why people like Hemingway.
Hemingway's most important rule is difficult to parse for a web app:<p>"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."<p><a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tragedy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tr...</a>