A review of the online writing tool, the Hemingway App

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. 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. 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.

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. Take, for instance, the sentence, ‘She ran quickly down the road’. 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. 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.

To assist in this process, I’ve been using the Hemingway App. 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. The app is named after the 20th century writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

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. 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. 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. Personally, I find this the most useful feature of the app and it’s primarily what I use it for.

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. I pasted every chapter of Staking a Claim into the app. 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. On closer inspection, many of these were unnecessary, obscuring my prose rather than clarifying it. 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. The result? Too many justs. Oh well, you live and learn.

Handily, the app also highlights passages written in passive voice. 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. What’s the difference? Active voice is when you have someone or something doing something else. Passive voice is when that someone or something is having that something else done to them. Clear as mud? An example should help:

Carlos hit the cricket ball. This is active voice. Carlos is doing something; he’s hitting the cricket ball.
The cricket ball was hit by Carlos. This is passive voice. The cricket ball is having something done to it; it’s being hit by Carlos.

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. It’s when it’s overused that it can become a problem. According to the app, the overuse of passive voice is not an issue in my 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. This is good to know; at least I’ve got that right.

Another useful feature of the app is its analysis of the readability of your writing. 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. The score is based on the educational grade level a person would need to understand that piece. So, a score of 6 would indicate someone with a Grade 6 education could successfully navigate that particular passage of writing. This is where you have to be a little careful. 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. I don’t pay too much attention to this feature. Generally, the chapters of my manuscript came in somewhere between a 6 and a 9, which the app considers good. Roughly speaking, about ten percent of my sentences were ‘hard to read’ and another ten percent were ‘very hard to read’. I guess this means eighty percent of my sentences are ‘easy to read’, which seems perfectly acceptable to me.

After toning down my justing, there were only a few chapters from Staking a Claim that came up as being overly adverbial. I tweaked those, tidied up a few other details and then, ta-da! I was done. Time to cross my fingers and send the manuscript off to my editor.

Are you a fan of adverbs? What’s your favourite? Let me know in the comments.

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