![]() I don’t pay too much attention to this feature. Getting rid of all your ‘hard to read’ and ‘very hard to read’ sentences might make your writing more accessible, but it’s also likely to remove all its personality and make it exceedingly dull. This is where you have to be a little careful. So, a score of 6 would indicate someone with a Grade 6 education could successfully navigate that particular passage of writing. The score is based on the educational grade level a person would need to understand that piece. It gives you a readability score based on the number of ‘hard to read’ and ‘very hard to read’ sentences within a piece of writing. This is good to know at least I’ve got that right.Īnother useful feature of the app is its analysis of the readability of your writing. I didn’t have a single chapter where the number of instances of passive voice was anywhere near the number the app suggested as being problematic. According to the app, the overuse of passive voice is not an issue in my writing. It’s when it’s overused that it can become a problem. The above example of passive voice is clearly a bit weird it’s not always that obvious and, as I said, there is a place for it. The cricket ball is having something done to it it’s being hit by Carlos. Carlos is doing something he’s hitting the cricket ball. Clear as mud? An example should help:Ĭarlos hit the cricket ball. ![]() Passive voice is when that someone or something is having that something else done to them. What’s the difference? Active voice is when you have someone or something doing something else. Just like adverbs, there’s a place for passive voice but it’s generally preferable to use active voice as it makes your writing more forceful. Handily, the app also highlights passages written in passive voice. It’s not a habit I was previously aware of, so out of curiosity, I pasted a few chapters from my first novel into the app for comparison. ![]() ![]() On closer inspection, many of these were unnecessary, obscuring my prose rather than clarifying it. To my surprise, the biggest issue it highlighted was my overuse of the adverbial ‘just’, as in, ‘I’m just going out for a walk,’ or, ‘I just want the patty no pickles, no sauce.’ Like any adverb, ‘just’ has its place, but I had characters ‘justing’ here, there, and everywhere. I pasted every chapter of Staking a Claim into the app. You can write text directly within the app, but since I use Scrivener for my fiction writing, I just copy and paste out of that. Personally, I find this the most useful feature of the app and it’s primarily what I use it for. So, if you have a passage that’s excessively adverbial, it’s easy to go through and see where and whether any of those adverbs could be removed. Among other things, it automatically highlights all the adverbs in a piece, as well as indicating an appropriate adverb count for that piece based on its overall length. Hemingway is well known for his clear and forceful writing style and these two goals underpin the design of the algorithms the app uses in analysing a piece of writing. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway on his boatĮrnest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. The app is named after the 20th century writer, Ernest Hemingway. Created by brothers Adam and Ben Long, there’s a desktop version for Mac and PC which you can buy for twenty US dollars, but I just use the free online version. To assist in this process, I’ve been using the Hemingway App. However, by simply replacing the verb and adverb pairing of ‘ran quickly’ with the single verb ‘sprinted’, you’d have, ‘She sprinted down the road.’ Okay, so it’s still not inspired, but it is more concise, and the picture it paints in the imagination is more focused and vivid. It’s not an inspired sentence by any means (and certainly not as entertaining as ‘I grapple with my groots and shoot down the grovelers and medicine men with my trusted blunderbuss’, which was my favourite line from the novel I just finished), but if you were writing a story where it was necessary to move a character from one point on a road to another point further along that road, then it would do the job. Take, for instance, the sentence, ‘She ran quickly down the road’. The general writing advice is that you should always aim to use a strong verb rather than trying to zhuzh-up a weak verb with a sparkly adverb. Now, I love a good adverb as much as the next man (‘frantically’ springs to mind), but it’s easy to overuse them and doing so only serves to weaken your writing, rather than strengthen it. Called Staking a Claim (it’s the sequel to my first novel), I’ve been tweaking some minor but important details to do with word choices, particularly my use of adverbs. I’ve been working on what is, depending on how you want to measure such things, the fifth or sixth draft of my current manuscript. A review of the online writing tool, the Hemingway App
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