Show HN: Brevity 500 – Short games to help you become a powerful writer

Conceptually, I really like this. Congratulations on getting it out there, and thank you for sharing.<p>The implementation confuses me though.<p>It&#x27;s not clear at first that all &quot;games&quot; (though I would think it&#x27;s rounds of a single game, not distinct games) are available rather than this being some kind of daily challenge.<p>The instructions are very drawn out and repetitive. There&#x27;s no reason the Welcome, Background, and Rules couldn&#x27;t be on one screen. The Mission page should just be merged with Rules.<p>The time limit seems pointless given that you get to see the text before the game starts. You could just write your text in Notepad using as much time as you want. I would either get rid of the timer (greatly preferred) or stop showing the text in advance (if you must).<p>It&#x27;s not clear what other rules (AI?) are being used to judge whether a response is valid, so when you get marked invalid even though you&#x27;re using all the required terms, it&#x27;s not clear what you&#x27;re supposed to do to make it valid.<p>It would be nice to be able to review the Background section of the instructions while writing.<p>After completion, you see your response compared to a target, but you can&#x27;t see the original anymore to compare target vs original to see how the target improved on the original.

0. Congrats on shipping.<p>1. This is really cool. Also scary. I think I might be the target market for this, I&#x27;ve long known that communication is my greatest professional weakness at this point, and within that, brevity is something I gotta learn.<p>2. I did one of the games (CVS, pharmacy, chemistry) and it was terrifying! By which I mean &quot;I think I might be exactly the sort of person who needs to be FORCED to do this, and I did so, and it was DIFFICULT AND UNCOMFORTABLE&quot;, which means your thing works. :D<p>3. I had to copy the original text to a side buffer so I could refer to it while I was writing. It would have been better if I could see it, and the required words, on one part of the screen (left? top?) while I entered my new text somewhere else.<p>4. The timer didn&#x27;t seem to work for me (firefox, linux), but that&#x27;s fine, there&#x27;s no way I could have gotten it done in time, and seeing the numbers decrease would have made it even harder. ^_^;;<p>5. I understand that &quot;grading&quot; in any sense is hard (you need a human), so I appreciate offering the example &quot;correct&quot; response, but you know what would have been even better? several &quot;valid&quot; rewrites, and perhaps a few that aren&#x27;t! What I mean to say is, as an admittedly poor writer, seeing both an example of what to do and what not to do could be of use.<p>6. I wish there were a way to spend 1&#x2F;20th as much for 1&#x2F;50th of the paid product first, before committing to buy the whole thing. There&#x27;s a large psychological difference between $5 and $100 and I&#x27;d pay $5 right now to test out the paid version 10 times, even though I&#x27;ll probably pay $100 for it, later. I might not though! I might forget! But that made my brain hurt so hard I&#x27;d drop $5 without a thought.<p>7. A difficulty level for each game would be FANTASTIC! Can you do that? Perhaps just 3 levels. That way people like me who are looking to take their writing ability from &quot;completely horrible&quot; to &quot;acceptable&quot; can have an easier time.

I don&#x27;t agree with equating brevity and quality.<p>There&#x27;s a definite trend in marketing&#x2F;business communication to cut everything down to the bare bones and call that quality. At best though, this is an over-simplification. Not every piece of writing has the same purpose, and the current fashion for brevity <i>aims</i> at clarity but often hits stilted instead.

I think both the idea and execution are great. These games would be useful even just as problem statements. I like that each problem clearly defines the desired tone and goals, and that the sample solutions have explanations.<p>Both in technical and creative writing, I agree that the main issue I&#x27;ve seen is unnecessary filler words, needlessly complicated sentences, and a difficulty clearly expressing the point and staying on-topic.<p>Some ideas - A copy of the original text with highlighted words above the editor might be nice - Not sure if the timer is helpful, might cause people to do a poor job for fear of running out of time. Could start without a timer and add it in as users get more practice

Calling these exercises &quot;Games&quot; is a stretch.<p>Also: Extra points if your good at memorizing a list of arbitrary words that must be included, and you&#x27;re a good touch typist. In these &quot;games&quot; Hunt-and-peck is a penalty, regardless if how facile you are at editing.

Congratulations on shipping!<p>Stray thoughts:<p>- From &quot;Play&quot; to the actual game is 6 clicks. I&#x27;d much prefer 2 or fewer.<p>- Might be even more fun or game-like to work with text on the sentence level. Certainly much faster for a user to complete, and you have more options for assessment as well.<p>- I&#x27;m curious about what other people have submitted, though I expect there&#x27;s a lot of noise in that data.

Cool! I love educational games and think they should be created more often.<p>Small bit of feedback that might be helpful: set a max width for your website. Currently it stretches to 100% width, but nobody really wants to write or read anything much wider than 800px, no matter how wide their browser window is.

If anyone needs ideas to write fiction, they should try RimWorld.<p>Stories write themselves.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rimworldgame.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rimworldgame.com&#x2F;</a>

When trying it out to see if there is any automated sentiment analysis, I noticed that my line of &quot;a&quot; just stretches endlessly out and breaks the text box. Anyways, does HN want to offer feedback on the first game involving explaining an issue to Mr. Smith about his ACME engine part? I was so concise that I couldn&#x27;t submit without adding some screaming noises to get my word count up.<p>(also, this was valid, so no - there is no sentiment analysis or anything similar to see if you still got the message across)<p>=== Smith you dummy, your engine is BROKE. Ford will not bow to pressure. Your warranty is as good as an anvil from ACME in a loony toon cartoon. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ===

I like this!<p>Although, I thought &quot;games&quot; would be different kinds of exercises, not just different prompts, so I am mildly disappointed :)<p>As others have said, I think the multiple-screen intro is not ideal, you might be able to fit everything in a single one.<p>I would consider adding scores rather than &quot;pass&#x2F;no pass&quot;, e.g. reduce text by 10% gets bronze, 20% is silver, 30% is gold.<p>But it is interesting, good luck!

A nit: introduction seems to say that the required words or phrases will still be available during the game, but I didn&#x27;t see any highlighting and had to remember. (Firefox)<p>Generally, judging validity just by whether a few phrases were kept seems pretty loose. I know, it would take incredible AI and might be completely subjective to decide whether the meaning is still there. But I didn&#x27;t like that it seemed I could completely mangle the text and it would say great job as long as it was short and still had those phrases.

This is a nice start, and succinct writing is a valuable skill. For a serious student of writing, the automated feedback is insufficient. Human feedback would be most useful. Designing automated feedback would be tricky, because the rewritten text must both be grammatically correct and have the same message.<p>FYI, There is a sentence simplification exercise inside of the larger app &quot;Elevate Brain Training&quot; on the Google Play app store for Android.

Unrelated to the site itself, which I am excited to try out, searching duckduckgo for &#x27;brevity 500&#x27; only shows the promotion posts here on hackernews, twitter, etc. and not the site itself. If I go to google, the site is the second result. I didn&#x27;t check any of the other search engines, but it might be worth a little time to make sure people can search and find your website with ease.

Hey looks really interesting. What do you think is the applicability of this to fiction writing?<p>Also what&#x27;s HN&#x27;s opinion of tools like ProwritingAid, Grammarly?

I hit go and the first thing I saw was: &quot;This game will challenge you to write well and write fast.&quot;<p>People write quickly. :). Normally I wouldn&#x27;t nitpick that, but since your whole site is about making better writers, I immediately have a trust issue if you can&#x27;t use adverbs correctly.

I can&#x27;t learn like that. Just getting in front of a problem and asking me to fix it.<p>I need more guidance on what are the problems, how the problems are fixed, examples, etc...<p>Hence, I can&#x27;t be a better writer just being put in front of a text to correct.

Ha! A few days ago a showHN startup post pitched a business that charged $55 for 500 words of your content, edited. Combined with a game like this that charges editors money to let them edit and you’ve got quite the business model.

Fun project, thanks for sharing!

Congrats on shipping!<p>My two cents on this add a difficulty level. 1370 characters to 500 characters is too difficult to many. Reducing 300 characters to 150 characters would be a better starting point for me.

Well that was a waste of time.<p>The site presents a phrase (mine was scraped from a blog post), and after several clicks asks you to rewrite it more concisely while retaining certain important words.<p>I thought they might take my response, give it to the next visitor to improve, and show me the result. Or let us vote on the best one. Instead they just reward you with a pre-canned answer, which, frankly, was less interesting than the one I composed.<p>Couldn&#x27;t help feeling it&#x27;s a veiled pitch to sell their $100 &quot;Learn add-on&quot;.<p>You&#x27;d have as much fun rewriting this comment in less than 100 words.

Fun! Unfortunately, this leans into the fact that I tend to be brief-to-a--fault.

Mobile phone offers noplace to edit the original text. What am I doing wrong?

IMO the time given for the &quot;games&quot; is far too little.

Maybe there could be something similar but for coding.

Personally I think this is a useless tool. Writing ability isn’t so easily trained like muscle memory and this website does not handle tone, style, or describe how to use grammar as a tool as opposed to it acting as a governance over your writing.<p>The people you’re talking about do not actually need to write well. The assumption is that the reader is capable of handling better writing and thus if the writing is better, the reading will be also. That’s not the case, not merely because improving writing often doesn’t improve the experience of reading, but also because most people don’t have extensive reading capabilities.<p>We test students entering college on their reading comprehension, and in general we only require them to understand approximately 60-70% of what they read. This means that 30-40% of what most people write is pointless crap that can go in the trash. Some idiots who aren’t considered confident in their intellectual abilities might scoff at this assessment, but unless I am reading and writing for an audience that also is capable of understanding the expression, then it is pointless to attempt expressing more.<p>That’s why I believe you noticed that most people don’t do well in reading&#x2F;writing… it’s simply not a skill most have and it also is not overly meaningful that is the case. Why paint for the blind?