- HEMINGWAY EDITOR WEBSITE HOW TO
- HEMINGWAY EDITOR WEBSITE PLUS
- HEMINGWAY EDITOR WEBSITE FREE
It does however say a lot about how easy it is to read. The Hemingway Editor doesn’t necessarily say anything about how good an article is.
Instead of getting defensive and blame the tool, it is worth trying to figure out what we can improve. In summary, here are 3 valuable lessons from the Hemingway Editor So that’s the way to go.Īfter fiddling a bit with my own example text above, Hemingway awarded me a grade 8:Īnd is it somehow dumber than my first example? I’d most definitely say no – unless it is considered dumb to start a sentence with but instead of however. Hemingway was over the moon, giving it an overall grade of 4. This time, I picked a perfectly well-written blog post in my view, written by UX Writer Mariana Posniak. I gave Hemingway one last article to check. In other words, it is possible to write clearly and intelligently at the same time. Interesting – clearly it is a terrible idea to rely on my own judgement to decide what is easy or hard to read for others.īut, you may say, should we really aim to write at a lower grade level because of the estimated reading skills of the average American? Isn’t that to dumb down our writing? Not necessarily! The Hemingway Editor points out that Ernest Hemingway’s work scores at 5th grade. It’s just hard to avoid them altogether sometimes. Passive constructions – yep, good point. OK, but are all adverbs bad? Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt to consider which ones are really needed. An example given by Hemingway is to write “tip-toed” instead of “walked slowly”. Hemingway also points out all adverbs in a text and suggests that you swap them for a more powerful verb. To be honest, it has never occurred to me that “however” would be hard for anyone to understand. The word “however” is marked as a word with simpler alternatives. But I didn’t know that most double-length sentences with a relative clause, comma or conjunction are considered too long. Oh – of course I already knew that long sentences are harder to read than shorter sentences. The overall grade I got was 12, with a recommendation to aim for 9. I went back to my own article that Hemingway had crushed. So if we want to make sure that most people can read our text without problems, this is what we should aim for. Studies show that the average American’s reading skills corresponds to a 10th grade level (15- or 16-year-olds). The researchers have tried to find out which US grade level is needed to understand a text. These researchers study how understandable a piece of writing is.” “… builds on the innovations of researchers of a field called ‘Readability’. But then I decided that it would be better to try to understand what was going on. Seriously?Īt this point, I was ready to put Hemingway and his editor in the bin. What was Hemingway’s verdict? Well, there was definitely a lot less red and yellow than in my own article. I chose one which in my opinion is both terribly written and hard to follow. Was my article bad? Was the article by my senior colleague even worse? This had to be investigated further. The app mercilessly marked almost every single sentence in red. What, my carefully crafted text? Surely not!įull of scepticism, I fed Hemingway another article, written by an experienced copywriting colleague. As you can see, Hemingway marked most of it in red (sentences that are very hard to read) and yellow (sentences that are hard to read). What did the Hemingway Editor have to say? Here’s a snapshot of the result: HEMINGWAY EDITOR WEBSITE PLUS
Plus I had overall positive feedback about this article. I say confidently because I am all for clarity and plain language. I confidently entered one of my recent articles in the tool.
HEMINGWAY EDITOR WEBSITE HOW TO
It even gives you suggestions on how to improve your rating. Add any text into the app, and it will rate its readability.
HEMINGWAY EDITOR WEBSITE FREE
The Hemingway Editor is a free desktop app that checks how readable a text is.
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