I really like the simplicity of using color coded highlights to communicate different errors.
It probably goes without saying that this may make more sense as a browser extension that hijacks textarea etc. The scope increases quite a bit, but it would be far more useful, as nobody wants to edit writing in one place and paste it into another.
These are good guidelines for producing the kind of sterile content technical folks might end up writing. Ambiguity, hedge words and verbosity can definitely hurt in that context.
That type of writing can be a negative in other contexts. In creative contexts it ends up producing very monotonous text that's tiring and uninteresting. In casual conversation (email, slack, etc.) it tends to feel inauthentic and/or cold.
That said, this tool handles all of this well. I think the UX is terrific.
I think the app follows largely with the suggestion in "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft". Using active voice instead of passive, avoid adverb, etc. Steve King writes good fiction IMO.
It's nice, but note it will make your writing succinct. Sometimes more succinct than it needs to be. I also wish the app had basic features like find and replace, which it lacks.
This writing is all approved, but if I write a longer sentence, it will give me a yellow line. This means that if I write a sentence in my normal length, about some topic that necessitates a longer sentence, it will give me a red or yellow highlight. This highlight makes it hard to read the text.
It's better thought of as a guide for writing in an effective style. Not a guide for writing well. Or properly.
Most people have never consciously changed their writing style. That exercise has value in itself. And there are worse styles one could imitate than Hemingway.
Yes. The app seems very useful in that regard. But I would like it to emphasize the style aspects of it, not some objective standard of "too complicated sentences".
> And there are worse styles one could imitate than Hemingway.
Certainly, including the one promoted by the app, which doesn't imitate Hemingway's style; at best it imitates a naive application of a maxim Hemingway reported as being influential early writing advice that he had received.
This was enforced by Hemingway. I originally wrote "Sometimes it forces me to be more succinct than I need to be", but that was flagged as a "confusing sentence" for some reason.
It's unreadable because the proper use of adverbs gives context. If the adverb "succinctly" was not flagged by this ridiculous app, the sentence would sound natural.
The phrase “to be” is an infinitive verb, and in this “sentence” is a component of the adjective phrase “more succinct than it needs to be” (which is modified by the adverb “sometimes”, remaining an adjective phrase).
When talking about the basic parts of a sentence (or, more generally, an independent clause), the required “verb” (the predicate) is more precisely a finite verb, which this phrase does not have. It also lacks a subject. And, for that matter, an object, though that's not generally required. It's just a freestanding adjective phrase.
Turns out, the Faulkner Editor is MUCH harder to implement well. And for most most practical purposes, the distinction between writing in the style of Hemingway, and talking like a robot, is ignorable.
And that's why I don't like this concept. Let's be honest, that passage sounds like crap. I'm all for brevity, and I think nowadays people tend to write with too much formality and bureaucracy, but this app is not the way to go about fixing the problem. Arbitrarily capping sentences to ~20 words (I assume that's what they do) makes your writing really choppy and more verbose, ironically. That last paragraph probably could have been just 1 long yet focused sentence.
What about something like google-docs-highlight [0].
It's inspired by the Gary Provost quote "This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with the energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important."
That quote is fantastic. I could feel the pace and rhythm change.
Sometimes I wish poetry other than rap music was popular. I know no one I can share poems with or equally show me their finds like we do with music and memes. I’m forever sending an mp3 or Spotify link to friends and vice versa.
I came across a decent writing tip using Hemingway: try to "balance" yellow and red sentences instead of eliminating them. Readers should be able to handle some yellow and the occasional red, but try not to bombard them.
The following was written by the actual Hemingway; the Hemingway Editor thinks it is okay except that it has 4 adverbs and should aim for “0 or fewer” (not sure how the “or fewer” works) and “1 of 1 sentences is hard to read”:
That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.
It considers a line break to break up a sentence. If you move the whole thing to a single line, it will naturally consider it to be far too long a sentence.
Kind of interesting to feed it actual Hemmingway excerpts - which it sometimes complains about.
Surprisingly I'm finding it complains about Cormac McCarthy and Hemmingway equally, at least based on the very small sample of excerpts I'm giving it. But then you throw in something like this from All the Pretty Horses and it's got strong opinions...
"In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives."
Hemingway? Just try pasting the following text there:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
I think Hemingway's style has become a bit of a meme that doesn't really reflect the reality of his writing. The last sentence in that excerpt from Farewell to Arms is a great example. Each individual clause is simple enough but he likes to connect them all together to create one connected image. The results from the Hemingway app can be disjointed and lack that flow.
Oof. Doesn't redirect to HTTPS. If you load the link (www. prefixed) with HTTPS, you'll get a certificate only for the bare domain.
This is probably over-indexing, but I don't think I'd trust a software company with all of my communications if the they can't get HTTPS right on their homepage.
How does this app work behind-the-scenes? I'd guessed it had been fed a corpus of Hemingway, and was using similarity matching. Judging by other comments here, it hasn't.
Would be nice if you could integrate some kind of spelling checker with it. I'm not fluent in English so it would be nice to not have to copy paste the text somewhere else to make sure there isn't any silly spelling mistakes.
yes! It should be called Kurt Vonnegut.
Apart from "passive voice" (oh, come on!) the following works perfectly:
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
Does this actually do what it claims, or is it just an illusion?
The sentences highlighted in red in its example aren't particularly difficult to read. If your audience can't understand this:
> If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
... the problem probably isn't you, but that you have the wrong audience to start with.
I'm guessing that this is just using a combination of Flesch-Kincaid, for readability scoring, and probably some libraries by Wooorm for detecting complex words and passive voice, among other things. Maybe I'm wrong.
What makes a sentence bad isn't necessarily how complex it is, but how much it is able to communicate with a given density. There's no way that traditional readability algorithms like Flesch-Kincaid can possibly score that. What would be more useful would be something that could detect vagueness of text, but haven't tried to solve this problem in the past, I found no such thing in existence.
This isn't to say that readability scores aren't useful, but they always need to be taken with a grain of salt and be used more as a guide than anything else.
All of this stuff is subjective to some extent. A newspaper columnist, novel author and manual writer will have different principles that apply to their writing.
The sentence you quoted is complex, and may readers will miss meaning, especially if it is presented an instruction.
It may be because I’m not a native English speaker, but the highlighted sentence is pretty hard to read. I lose track of the words around half way. After “get lost” I want the sentence to stop. My brain split the sentence right there, meaning the remaing part has no context, it’s just words the fail to belong.
It’s not that I’m a poor reader. I do real slower in English, but I can easily read something like The Economist.
I have seen it noted by product managers that programmers tend to write with a very dense style that typically includes more context switching (for example, this sentence) than non-programmers.
I also find the "dense difficult sentence" example to be neither dense nor difficult but I think this might be related to the huge amount of my life spent exercising that "writing context" brain-muscle by writing "then" statements while keeping the "if" context in mind.
Edit: The point being, these guidelines are not universal and will have varied relevance among different works/audiences.
i'm really struggling to find a great work of literature that this app doesn't think is terrible. the idea is conceptually neat, and the UX is nice though
constructively, think a lot of these decisions are too strict, for example 'perhaps you already know this' is asked to be replaced with 'you already know this'. Even murakami, who writes in the very clear way the app looks for gets flagged up:
> Both elbows on the table, I covered my face with my palms.
Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain [softly](<-- 'use a forceful verb') falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining.
>
> Until someone came and [lightly](<-- use a forceful verb) rested a hand on my shoulder, my thoughts were of the sea
I assume this is targeted mostly at a business communication use case, similar to Grammarly and others. Clear, unambiguous, and standardized communication is far more important in this context than in literary fiction.
If someone at work sent me a design doc and it read like Ulysses, I would not be pleased.
The trend towards using syntactic machines to teach people to write perplexes me because writing is foremost about meaning. For example, the Gettysburg address begins:
> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Hemingway flags that as passive voice, but it's actually a present progressive construction. Rather than computers making us more fully human, they strive to make us more machine like, and that's a worry.
The problem is that for every Lincoln you have hundreds of thousands of people who will never put together a sentence of that caliber, myself included.
I don't worry about great writers using this app and becoming more machine like. But everyday I come across documentation or emails that would benefit from this app.
I suppose I haven't given up on the idea that all of us can aim at being more fully human. You might be able to put together a sentence of that caliber! Particularly if you read a large corpus of great writing.
The worry is that young writers will become more machine-like in their thoughts, as part of a broader project to make people more machine like. For example, Google Docs complained to me that the sentence, "We will analyze the ballistics of the South Dakota, focusing on parameterizing the equations of motion" was incorrect because you don't put "the" in front of the name of a state. But I was talking about BB-57, the USS South Dakota, a battleship. Google Docs, naturally, doesn't have a sense of historical context.
I'm no great writer, to be sure, but the computer just doesn't understand what I mean, so it flags my thoughts as being wrong in some way. That smoothing out our thoughts is a long-term problem if our goal is to lead human lives, particularly as it makes it into education.
The difficulty, of course, is that clarity is primarily a function of ideas and meaning, and ideas and meaning are totally opaque to tools like this. For example, no complaints about this sentence:
> The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thur.
And if I change the sentence to:
> The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thurs.
it tells me my reading level has changed from 7th to 8th grade despite Thurs being a much more common shortening of "Thursday" than "Thur", which is nonsense. God forbid such tools ever be used with young students.
"Now we fight/pursue/battle in/confront a great civil war..."
The passive voice (combined with the weak verb "to be engaged") emphasizes a future without the war ("we" and "endure"), not riling people up to fight it.
As you imply, passive voice is a tool humans can use to influence other humans. Of course, any tool can be abused, but that's no reason to yank it out of the box.
It uses a simple algorithm to detect passives: be + past participle. It can't detect passives that don't follow that pattern, such as prepositional passives and get passives, and it labels some clauses as passive when they aren't.
Ironically, if you chose a random passage from Hemingway instead of Lincoln, it would litter that with spurious warnings too.
My particular objections to people being made machine like are rooted in a Christian conception of the inherent worth of humans as being made in the image of God (who is not a machine). Being machine-like impedes our progress towards our telos.
"We are engaged" is passive though. Specifically its form is passive: be + past participle. But its meaning is more reflexive than anything else. I don't know what the subject of that sentence would be in an active construction. Maybe "We have engaged ourselves in a great…" or possibly a bit more poetic "Fate has engaged us in a…". But this really speaks to your original point that a passive _construction_ (not necessarily meaning) does not always hide information the reader needs.
Yeah, if a couple really wanted to avoid the passive voice, instead of saying "we got engaged" they should say "we engaged each other". But I don't think that really conveys the intended meaning.
The same thing is true of of the Lincoln speech, in a somewhat different way.
Does anyone really need to be warned that they are using the passive voice? Does anyone actually do that by accident?
I think people use passive voice unintentionally or thoughtlessly. Not sure if you'd call that "by accident."
I see it quite often in business writing, I think people fall into it because it's a way to avoid taking responsibility. "It has been decided" vs. "I have decided." I would not say that it's always intentional.
> Does anyone really need to be warned that they are using the passive voice? Does anyone actually do that by accident?
Yes, all the time. I write a lot and still fall into the trap, and it is hard not to do it sometimes especially if you were only introduced to the concept later in life. I try hard not to use the passive voice, but there are times when I think it is acceptable, and there are occasions where the alternative is more confusing. The quoted speech "Now we are engaged in a great civil war..." sounds perfectly fine to me!
Honestly, I have trouble thinking of an alternative sometimes, even when I can identify a passive voice sentence.
Good catch - but the thing to remember is, Hemingway isn't meant for writing great, historic speeches. It's basically meant for corporate emails, blog posts and the like.
A writing app isn't there to turn Obama into Lincoln, it's there to get completely dysfunctional prose to borderline readable. I don't think there's any risk that Thomas Pynchon starts using this in a misguided attempt to emulate Hemingway.
Fwiw, the Gettysburg address would have been pretty bad as prose. It was written to be delivered as a speech.
A speaker can control inflection and intonation, which add their own meaning and interact with the actual word choices. Written word has no such luxury.
Also, the Gettysburg Address was written 150 years ago. Language norms change over time.
Society itself is trying to make us more machine-like, and it bends the practice of writing to that end.
If you want to write well, you have to read a lot of good writing, preferably starting at a young age. But if all you're trying to write is legible work email, or cookie-cutter marketing copy, or whatever, an electronic nanny can probably get you across the finish line.
Quite so. I suppose I lament the idea that you can become a good writer whilst shortcutting reading a large corpus of good literature. There are many ancillary benefits to reading good literature, and losing them makes education as formation that much harder.
It's a much more important example of the phenomenon that children who are glued to phones or movies on long car trips instead of playing the license plate game are missing out on some implicit geographical education.
This is really only going to make your writing "bold and clear" if you prefer one specific style of writing, something perhaps akin to how Hemingway wrote.
I pasted in the first line of 100 Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, considered to be one of the greatest opening lines of 20th century literature, and was warned for its length and complexity.
Writing which has aesthetic appeal cannot be boiled down to a heuristic which prizes one element (simplicity) over all others. You can develop interesting writing, and even beautiful writing that way. You can notice bad habits and avoid them. But writing is not so simple as to have one expressive path which creates "boldness" and "clarity."
This reminds of the technical writing education I received in college. While I understand the goal of this guidance is to make technical communication as clear and concise as possible, I also feel like it leads to a world of boring writers. And (IMO) boring communication actually should be recognized as worse communication, in comparison to communication that combines technical detail with human deliverance.
The problem is all the more exacerbated when the guidance uses a checklist-like rubric such as:
-"this sentence exceeds X word count, consider splitting"
-"this sentence uses passive voice, use active voice".
I remember "revising" parts of my senior design to score higher against a similar rubric, despite being confident that the revision was overall worse.
Writing quality is inherently subjective, maybe to the chagrin of engineering types. Even though there are horrendous emails and documentation in the wild, I still think teaching people how to write with tools like this isn't the solution.
What is a better solution? For business writing, just consistently considering the active voice would improve many writers’ output.
“It was decided that we’d lower shipping prices.” versus “Chris decided to lower our shipping prices.”
I don’t know if writers choose the former because it feels fancier, because they notice other writers doing it (maybe because they struggled to read what was written and took notice of the pattern?), or because they don’t know or don’t want to commit to what actually happened, but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.
Passive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus. The choice between active and passive voice should be based on this choice of focus.
You can’t say categorically that the active voice is better than passive, classical rule of thumb notwithstanding.
Yeah, but to people who see what you’re doing, it’s clear that you’re dodging responsibility. Like, focusing on the action is preferable because it takes emphasis off the doer. I prefer that folks just say “we did the thing” instead of saying “the thing was done”. We know who did it, trying to shade that fact away with grammar just looks suspicious.
Most of the people complaining about the passive have either serious trouble identifying a passive at all, or can't construct an argument why it's bad to save their lives, as amply demonstrated by Geoffrey Pullum. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf Section 2 is a bit technical, but the rest is a great read.
In your example, the primary difference for me wasn't so much active-vs-passive, but attribution. I've seen the passive voice used to great effect for softening statements and avoiding the assignment of blame/other undesirable attribute.
Instead of "Chris and Jack disagreed during the discussion", one could say "No agreement was reached during the discussion". One may say this is mealy-mouthed, but it seems to me that managing emotions is a supremely important part of being a good communicator and being a consensus-builder. Avoiding the use of language that triggers "fight-or-flight" responses is very useful in many situations.
For the simplest of communications, like an IM or short email, maybe using checklist rules does impart more good than bad.
But I think in larger writing pieces, including those technical in nature, these rules produce low quality writing. In my experience it produces extremely curt, choppy writing with overall bad flow. It almost feels like a bulleted list converted to a paragraph, with a sprinklings of "and"s, "so"s and "because"s. And while "flow" sounds like a wishy-washy concept, I think it is effectual and worthy of first level consideration. It shapes how well your ideas synthesize together, and ultimately how well you communicate your thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
The passive voice one is a common misunderstanding. Passive voice isn't bad but it's primary purpose is to allow flexibility in word order.
A good rule of thumb is to have something familiar at the beginning of a sentence and something new at the end of a sentence. Further, to create flow what was the new part in the previous sentence should become the familiar part in the current sentence. Subject verb object pattern in the active voice often requires the object performing the action of the verb to be at the beginning of the sentence . This is often not desirable if that object is indeed the new thing you want to introduce at the end of a sentence.
In French, passive voice is used to redirect the spotlight on meaningful bits.
In their example & imho, "Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice." communicates their intent better than "We marked in green phrase using passive voice". The 'we' is useless.
You can replace "have been" with are in these sorts of cases. So "Phrases in green are marked to show passive voice." Or even shorter "Phrases in green use passive voice".
> Phrases in green are marked to show passive voice.
That's still flagged as passive voice by this abomination of an editor.
> Phrases in green use passive voice.
The meaning of that is less clear than the original. The phrase isn't using anything. We are talking about how it was written: facts about its construction that happened to it. The only way we can do that honestly and concisely is with passive voice because the phrase is only passively involved.
You've perfectly demonstrated the problem with these kinds of revisions. "Phrases in green use passive voice" removes the passive voice, and in doing so, completely alters the semantic content of the sentence. The passive voice expressed a meaningfully different notion.
> In French, passive voice is used to redirect the spotlight on meaningful bits.
True in English, too.
It's a common bad-writing problem in English that it is frequently used improperly so that it obscures meaningful bits while being excessively verbose. Thus, common neophyte advice is “avoid passive voice”, and some people get super religious about this without understanding what problem the advice aina to solve.
I think we see passive voice a lot in technology because we're frequently describing actions and outcomes. The actors are either irrelevant or continuous and unambiguously implied.
In the example we'd have to keep referring to 'Hemingway' or 'the application' in order to maintain active voice, which adds no value. E.g. 'Hemingway marks phrases green to show passive voice'
Passive voice allows us to switch focus to the object that is being acted upon, which is much more relevant.
>Passive voice isn't bad but it's primary purpose is to allow flexibility in word order.
Maybe we're reading different things but from everything a I see, passive voice is way overused. Most writers are not deliberately sequencing their word order in the sentences which results in passive voice. Instead, most writers are omitting the active agent because it's the easier default. Unfortunately, this overuse of passive voice lacks punch.
Example of a classic passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made."
Writers love hiding behind passive constructions like that. With no explicit agent, there's nobody in specific to point blame at nor offend. But the reader wants to know _who_ made the mistake. If possible, write the agent into the sentence: "Nixon made mistakes." or "Kissinger made mistakes."
There was a writing style book that compared 10-K annual financial reports from companies that got hit by accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom) vs clean companies (Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffet). There was a significantly more passive voice sentences in the dishonest companies. In contrast, Warren Buffet writes in a lively active-voice style ("I invested in this. We lost money on that.") I just checked the BH's most recent 2020 10-K and Warren Buffet still writes in active voice.
(I wonder if there's a hedge fund that uses text analysis software to scan 10-K filings to quantify which company is overusing passive-voice as a parameter to their models.)
For technical reports like "post-mortem of website outages"... the heavy use of passive voice is understandable since it's just trying to explain the problem and eventual solution and not focus on _who_ fat-fingered the command-line with incorrect config to cause the outage.
>You can be just as evasive in the active voice. Someone made a mistake.
Yes, but by explicitly adding the word "someone [...]", the hiding/concealment is calling attention to itself. It's an unusual and awkward construction of a sentence -- or -- the writer was trying to write a mystery/crime novel.
On the other hand, if the writer doesn't want to name the agent without drawing attention to the writing style, the overuse of passive "to be" verbs instead of active verbs is the way to do it. Passive voice is the hallmark of government bureaucratic reports and they're boring and lack punch.
>Most uses of the passive have nothing to do with being evasive.
I would agree it's overused and often a sign the writer lacks clarity into what they are trying to communicate (aside from the more nefarious uses to obfuscate).
But I think it helps to understand it's purpose instead of to say it's just bad.
> trying to explain the problem and eventual solution and not focus on _who_ fat-fingered the command-line with incorrect config to cause the outage.
Yes! It's important for the newspapers to hold Nixon accountable. The rest of us have stuff do so we can afford to buy papers that tell us whose fault that is.
Yes, the passive voice is an information packaging construction. There are several others: existential clauses, it-cleft constructions, preposing and postposing, etc. It's just one of the many ways we can adjust the construction of English clauses to suit our purposes.
> This reminds of the technical writing education I received in college. While I understand the goal of this guidance is to make technical communication as clear and concise as possible, I also feel like it leads to a world of boring writers. And (IMO) boring communication actually should be recognized as worse communication, in comparison to communication that combines technical detail with human deliverance.
The site says this sentence is very hard to read, and I will get lost trying to follow your meandering. :)
I totally agree, I disabled all predictive text. The feature in Gmail is the worst. It's like, no thanks Google, I don't need you to tell me what I'm going to say, or how to say it.
A common pitfall when trying to humanise technical content (particularly error messages) is to add folksy cutesy whimsical flourishes which are cute and funny and whatever to some of your audience, but might be a barrier to others (particular those who do not share your cultural background or have English as a second language).
When I was a child learning to write, so many of these rules bothered me so much. I'd get notes like that on my papers, and I'd think, "Yeah, but my way sounds better..." But so often that point is met with a blank stare, as if how the writing comes out doesn't matter at all compared to whether the "rules" were followed.
I'm sure a lot of it was me just being a headstrong young person, but I also know that according to grades, I was much better at writing than most of my peers, and I also continually felt like I was writing worse than I could have been, in order to satisfy teachers.
The goal of all writing classes is to make the grader happy. For a good writing class, making the grader happy and writing well are in close alignment. For the overwhelming majority of writing classes the two are mostly orthogonal.
The above paragraph is obvious to many, but wasn't to me as I'm not great at picking up on social cues. What finally made it click was comparing grades with a friend for an assignment that had a rubric. Each category could get a "+" a "" or a "-" (in descending order of "goodness"). My friends marks were strictly worse than mine, he got a B, I got a D.
Usually it's less blatant than this, but this particular teacher had it in for me (though not without cause).
90% of the time when I give feedback reviewing other people's work that they use passive, it's not using about active for the sake of active. It's that in choosing to use the passive, the writer leaves ambiguous who is performing an action.
I'm very curious what the Hemingway estate has to say about this. I recall a certain "distraction-free electronic typewriter" that renamed itself after launching with a Hemingway-derived name.
I think Hemingway wrote in a terse manner because it helped him to convey a certain atmosphere and notion of depth beyond what the bare words presented, not because he was trying to simplify things so that people who lack high-level English skills could follow what he was saying.
>If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
Some readers. Not everyone writes with the intention of reaching the largest possible audience. Of course many people do write with that intention, and in many contexts that is a very good intention, but it seems to me that to associate such simplification with Hemingway the writer is misleading.
I love this app so much that I'm sometimes reluctant to share it with people. I'm afraid if it becomes too popular they'll add new features and ruin it.
My process of writing anything goes through this tool. I write in a plain text file to avoid distraction. Then run it through this app to simplify the writing and make it more legible. Then I pass it through scribens, another tool in my pipeline to catch mistakes. Since I can never find someone to read and edit my work, I convert it to audio and using a TTS reader.
I'm using Workflowy to brainstorm and capture ideas and Ulysses for writing. I appreciate both products for being clean and simple to use and not bloated with unnecessary features.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadIt probably goes without saying that this may make more sense as a browser extension that hijacks textarea etc. The scope increases quite a bit, but it would be far more useful, as nobody wants to edit writing in one place and paste it into another.
That type of writing can be a negative in other contexts. In creative contexts it ends up producing very monotonous text that's tiring and uninteresting. In casual conversation (email, slack, etc.) it tends to feel inauthentic and/or cold.
That said, this tool handles all of this well. I think the UX is terrific.
I bought this app a while ago.
It's nice, but note it will make your writing succinct. Sometimes more succinct than it needs to be. I also wish the app had basic features like find and replace, which it lacks.
This writing is all approved, but if I write a longer sentence, it will give me a yellow line. This means that if I write a sentence in my normal length, about some topic that necessitates a longer sentence, it will give me a red or yellow highlight. This highlight makes it hard to read the text.
Most people have never consciously changed their writing style. That exercise has value in itself. And there are worse styles one could imitate than Hemingway.
Certainly, including the one promoted by the app, which doesn't imitate Hemingway's style; at best it imitates a naive application of a maxim Hemingway reported as being influential early writing advice that he had received.
As far as I can tell, "Sometimes more succinct than it needs to be" is grammatically incorrect because it lacks a predicate.
What's "be" if it's not a verb?
The phrase “to be” is an infinitive verb, and in this “sentence” is a component of the adjective phrase “more succinct than it needs to be” (which is modified by the adverb “sometimes”, remaining an adjective phrase).
When talking about the basic parts of a sentence (or, more generally, an independent clause), the required “verb” (the predicate) is more precisely a finite verb, which this phrase does not have. It also lacks a subject. And, for that matter, an object, though that's not generally required. It's just a freestanding adjective phrase.
Sad.
You mean every "sentence" must have a "finite verb"? Do you have a good url explaining that?
Writing != Talking.
No native English speaker would talk like Hemingway speaks.
The genius of Hemingway's writing can be lost if you look only at his writing style and ignore everything else.
And yet more and more people talk like robots.
It's inspired by the Gary Provost quote "This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with the energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important."
[0]: https://github.com/ojoven/google-docs-highlight
a) A paragraph-level analysis to account of sentence length variety
b) A document-level analysis of the same type
c) Suggestions for where sentence length needs to be varied, for example where long sentences should be broken, and so on.
There's a LOT of books with guidelines to improve writing, but it seems like 99% of the tools are only brushing the surface at best.
Sometimes I wish poetry other than rap music was popular. I know no one I can share poems with or equally show me their finds like we do with music and memes. I’m forever sending an mp3 or Spotify link to friends and vice versa.
Nobody ever iMessages a sonnet.
I feel better informed after reading your comment. I would like to express my appreciation.
Your last sentence was too long.
That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.
(From Green Hills of Africa)
Surprisingly I'm finding it complains about Cormac McCarthy and Hemmingway equally, at least based on the very small sample of excerpts I'm giving it. But then you throw in something like this from All the Pretty Horses and it's got strong opinions...
"In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives."
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
This is probably over-indexing, but I don't think I'd trust a software company with all of my communications if the they can't get HTTPS right on their homepage.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
The sentences highlighted in red in its example aren't particularly difficult to read. If your audience can't understand this:
> If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
... the problem probably isn't you, but that you have the wrong audience to start with.
I'm guessing that this is just using a combination of Flesch-Kincaid, for readability scoring, and probably some libraries by Wooorm for detecting complex words and passive voice, among other things. Maybe I'm wrong.
What makes a sentence bad isn't necessarily how complex it is, but how much it is able to communicate with a given density. There's no way that traditional readability algorithms like Flesch-Kincaid can possibly score that. What would be more useful would be something that could detect vagueness of text, but haven't tried to solve this problem in the past, I found no such thing in existence.
This isn't to say that readability scores aren't useful, but they always need to be taken with a grain of salt and be used more as a guide than anything else.
The sentence you quoted is complex, and may readers will miss meaning, especially if it is presented an instruction.
It’s not that I’m a poor reader. I do real slower in English, but I can easily read something like The Economist.
I also find the "dense difficult sentence" example to be neither dense nor difficult but I think this might be related to the huge amount of my life spent exercising that "writing context" brain-muscle by writing "then" statements while keeping the "if" context in mind.
Edit: The point being, these guidelines are not universal and will have varied relevance among different works/audiences.
But it'd be better as a Google Docs plugin. My workflow goes from Gdocs => edit in Hemingway => paste back in Gdocs => export to Markdown.
constructively, think a lot of these decisions are too strict, for example 'perhaps you already know this' is asked to be replaced with 'you already know this'. Even murakami, who writes in the very clear way the app looks for gets flagged up:
> Both elbows on the table, I covered my face with my palms. Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain [softly](<-- 'use a forceful verb') falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining.
>
> Until someone came and [lightly](<-- use a forceful verb) rested a hand on my shoulder, my thoughts were of the sea
I assume this is targeted mostly at a business communication use case, similar to Grammarly and others. Clear, unambiguous, and standardized communication is far more important in this context than in literary fiction.
If someone at work sent me a design doc and it read like Ulysses, I would not be pleased.
> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Hemingway flags that as passive voice, but it's actually a present progressive construction. Rather than computers making us more fully human, they strive to make us more machine like, and that's a worry.
I don't worry about great writers using this app and becoming more machine like. But everyday I come across documentation or emails that would benefit from this app.
The worry is that young writers will become more machine-like in their thoughts, as part of a broader project to make people more machine like. For example, Google Docs complained to me that the sentence, "We will analyze the ballistics of the South Dakota, focusing on parameterizing the equations of motion" was incorrect because you don't put "the" in front of the name of a state. But I was talking about BB-57, the USS South Dakota, a battleship. Google Docs, naturally, doesn't have a sense of historical context.
I'm no great writer, to be sure, but the computer just doesn't understand what I mean, so it flags my thoughts as being wrong in some way. That smoothing out our thoughts is a long-term problem if our goal is to lead human lives, particularly as it makes it into education.
I'd like to see what it makes of the average software TOS agreement.
> The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thur.
And if I change the sentence to:
> The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thurs.
it tells me my reading level has changed from 7th to 8th grade despite Thurs being a much more common shortening of "Thursday" than "Thur", which is nonsense. God forbid such tools ever be used with young students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous
Either way, active can really change the meaning:
"Now we fight/pursue/battle in/confront a great civil war..."
The passive voice (combined with the weak verb "to be engaged") emphasizes a future without the war ("we" and "endure"), not riling people up to fight it.
As you imply, passive voice is a tool humans can use to influence other humans. Of course, any tool can be abused, but that's no reason to yank it out of the box.
Ironically, if you chose a random passage from Hemingway instead of Lincoln, it would litter that with spurious warnings too.
I feel like this attitude reflects a bias against machines and machine-like people that could lead to discrimination against them.
Wouldn't that just be "Now we engage in a great civil war, [...]"?
The same thing is true of of the Lincoln speech, in a somewhat different way.
Does anyone really need to be warned that they are using the passive voice? Does anyone actually do that by accident?
I see it quite often in business writing, I think people fall into it because it's a way to avoid taking responsibility. "It has been decided" vs. "I have decided." I would not say that it's always intentional.
Yes, all the time. I write a lot and still fall into the trap, and it is hard not to do it sometimes especially if you were only introduced to the concept later in life. I try hard not to use the passive voice, but there are times when I think it is acceptable, and there are occasions where the alternative is more confusing. The quoted speech "Now we are engaged in a great civil war..." sounds perfectly fine to me!
Honestly, I have trouble thinking of an alternative sometimes, even when I can identify a passive voice sentence.
A speaker can control inflection and intonation, which add their own meaning and interact with the actual word choices. Written word has no such luxury.
Also, the Gettysburg Address was written 150 years ago. Language norms change over time.
If you want to write well, you have to read a lot of good writing, preferably starting at a young age. But if all you're trying to write is legible work email, or cookie-cutter marketing copy, or whatever, an electronic nanny can probably get you across the finish line.
It's a much more important example of the phenomenon that children who are glued to phones or movies on long car trips instead of playing the license plate game are missing out on some implicit geographical education.
I pasted in the first line of 100 Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, considered to be one of the greatest opening lines of 20th century literature, and was warned for its length and complexity.
Writing which has aesthetic appeal cannot be boiled down to a heuristic which prizes one element (simplicity) over all others. You can develop interesting writing, and even beautiful writing that way. You can notice bad habits and avoid them. But writing is not so simple as to have one expressive path which creates "boldness" and "clarity."
The problem is all the more exacerbated when the guidance uses a checklist-like rubric such as:
-"this sentence exceeds X word count, consider splitting"
-"this sentence uses passive voice, use active voice".
I remember "revising" parts of my senior design to score higher against a similar rubric, despite being confident that the revision was overall worse.
Writing quality is inherently subjective, maybe to the chagrin of engineering types. Even though there are horrendous emails and documentation in the wild, I still think teaching people how to write with tools like this isn't the solution.
“It was decided that we’d lower shipping prices.” versus “Chris decided to lower our shipping prices.”
I don’t know if writers choose the former because it feels fancier, because they notice other writers doing it (maybe because they struggled to read what was written and took notice of the pattern?), or because they don’t know or don’t want to commit to what actually happened, but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.
Behold, the most important thing to know about business writing:
>Chris broke the build.
>The build was broken.
We Chrises can never get a break... unless its the build. -_-
Tolstoy's War and Peace would frustrate you to insanity in that case.
What looks like good writing in English may look like childish, repetitive prose in other languages.
Most of the people complaining about the passive have either serious trouble identifying a passive at all, or can't construct an argument why it's bad to save their lives, as amply demonstrated by Geoffrey Pullum. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf Section 2 is a bit technical, but the rest is a great read.
Instead of "Chris and Jack disagreed during the discussion", one could say "No agreement was reached during the discussion". One may say this is mealy-mouthed, but it seems to me that managing emotions is a supremely important part of being a good communicator and being a consensus-builder. Avoiding the use of language that triggers "fight-or-flight" responses is very useful in many situations.
But I think in larger writing pieces, including those technical in nature, these rules produce low quality writing. In my experience it produces extremely curt, choppy writing with overall bad flow. It almost feels like a bulleted list converted to a paragraph, with a sprinklings of "and"s, "so"s and "because"s. And while "flow" sounds like a wishy-washy concept, I think it is effectual and worthy of first level consideration. It shapes how well your ideas synthesize together, and ultimately how well you communicate your thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
A good rule of thumb is to have something familiar at the beginning of a sentence and something new at the end of a sentence. Further, to create flow what was the new part in the previous sentence should become the familiar part in the current sentence. Subject verb object pattern in the active voice often requires the object performing the action of the verb to be at the beginning of the sentence . This is often not desirable if that object is indeed the new thing you want to introduce at the end of a sentence.
In their example & imho, "Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice." communicates their intent better than "We marked in green phrase using passive voice". The 'we' is useless.
That's still flagged as passive voice by this abomination of an editor.
> Phrases in green use passive voice.
The meaning of that is less clear than the original. The phrase isn't using anything. We are talking about how it was written: facts about its construction that happened to it. The only way we can do that honestly and concisely is with passive voice because the phrase is only passively involved.
Rules like these are toxic nonsense.
True in English, too.
It's a common bad-writing problem in English that it is frequently used improperly so that it obscures meaningful bits while being excessively verbose. Thus, common neophyte advice is “avoid passive voice”, and some people get super religious about this without understanding what problem the advice aina to solve.
In the example we'd have to keep referring to 'Hemingway' or 'the application' in order to maintain active voice, which adds no value. E.g. 'Hemingway marks phrases green to show passive voice'
Passive voice allows us to switch focus to the object that is being acted upon, which is much more relevant.
Maybe we're reading different things but from everything a I see, passive voice is way overused. Most writers are not deliberately sequencing their word order in the sentences which results in passive voice. Instead, most writers are omitting the active agent because it's the easier default. Unfortunately, this overuse of passive voice lacks punch.
Example of a classic passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made."
Writers love hiding behind passive constructions like that. With no explicit agent, there's nobody in specific to point blame at nor offend. But the reader wants to know _who_ made the mistake. If possible, write the agent into the sentence: "Nixon made mistakes." or "Kissinger made mistakes."
There was a writing style book that compared 10-K annual financial reports from companies that got hit by accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom) vs clean companies (Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffet). There was a significantly more passive voice sentences in the dishonest companies. In contrast, Warren Buffet writes in a lively active-voice style ("I invested in this. We lost money on that.") I just checked the BH's most recent 2020 10-K and Warren Buffet still writes in active voice.
(I wonder if there's a hedge fund that uses text analysis software to scan 10-K filings to quantify which company is overusing passive-voice as a parameter to their models.)
For technical reports like "post-mortem of website outages"... the heavy use of passive voice is understandable since it's just trying to explain the problem and eventual solution and not focus on _who_ fat-fingered the command-line with incorrect config to cause the outage.
You can be just as evasive in the active voice. Someone made a mistake. An error caused the deletion of your data.
Most uses of the passive have nothing to do with being evasive.
Yes, but by explicitly adding the word "someone [...]", the hiding/concealment is calling attention to itself. It's an unusual and awkward construction of a sentence -- or -- the writer was trying to write a mystery/crime novel.
On the other hand, if the writer doesn't want to name the agent without drawing attention to the writing style, the overuse of passive "to be" verbs instead of active verbs is the way to do it. Passive voice is the hallmark of government bureaucratic reports and they're boring and lack punch.
>Most uses of the passive have nothing to do with being evasive.
I agree.
But I think it helps to understand it's purpose instead of to say it's just bad.
Yes! It's important for the newspapers to hold Nixon accountable. The rest of us have stuff do so we can afford to buy papers that tell us whose fault that is.
The site says this sentence is very hard to read, and I will get lost trying to follow your meandering. :)
I totally agree, I disabled all predictive text. The feature in Gmail is the worst. It's like, no thanks Google, I don't need you to tell me what I'm going to say, or how to say it.
And the LAST thing I want to see is people reverting back to the obnoxiously wordy and flowery styles of writing that were common a hundred years ago+
I'm sure a lot of it was me just being a headstrong young person, but I also know that according to grades, I was much better at writing than most of my peers, and I also continually felt like I was writing worse than I could have been, in order to satisfy teachers.
The above paragraph is obvious to many, but wasn't to me as I'm not great at picking up on social cues. What finally made it click was comparing grades with a friend for an assignment that had a rubric. Each category could get a "+" a "" or a "-" (in descending order of "goodness"). My friends marks were strictly worse than mine, he got a B, I got a D.
Usually it's less blatant than this, but this particular teacher had it in for me (though not without cause).
Given the low resilience of most people, training wheels is going to win out, and the beauty of it is that they are removable.
>If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
Some readers. Not everyone writes with the intention of reaching the largest possible audience. Of course many people do write with that intention, and in many contexts that is a very good intention, but it seems to me that to associate such simplification with Hemingway the writer is misleading.
Long ago I used this tool for my thesis and I think it did help me with the stylistics. Including pruning too many, too long sentences.
My process of writing anything goes through this tool. I write in a plain text file to avoid distraction. Then run it through this app to simplify the writing and make it more legible. Then I pass it through scribens, another tool in my pipeline to catch mistakes. Since I can never find someone to read and edit my work, I convert it to audio and using a TTS reader.
It drastically improves my writing.
I'm using Workflowy to brainstorm and capture ideas and Ulysses for writing. I appreciate both products for being clean and simple to use and not bloated with unnecessary features.