An App for Turning Your Crummy Scrawl Into Hemingway Quality Prose

The Hemingway app is a program that prompts a user for a sample of their writing and analyzes it for difficulty of reading, overuse of adverbs, use of overcomplicated words, and passive voice. The app highlights areas where a user's writing could be tightened up, and, generally, different ways the average writer can come up with bold and intelligible sentences like Hemingway. “With simpler sentences, readers spend more effort understanding your point than parsing your writing,” Adam Long, co-founder of the Hemingway app, told me on Thursday.

I wrote a few lines into the program and got an “O.K.” rating, leaving me a bit self-conscious. Don’t be mislead, though, because much of Hemingway’s own writing receives the same rating, which I learned just from pasting some of it in. Long told me he had tried the same experiment I did, as you might expect, but he said that isn’t the point. “The important thing to look at is the average reading level he writes at. It's usually in the single digits for grade level. That speaks to how influential the rules he learned at the Kansas City Star were on his style. Short, declarative sentences are key.” So, Hemingway might not have constantly fit into his own formula for writing, but overall he maintained clear, bare bones writing.

The Hemingway app uses the Automated Readability Index, which is a formula that calculates how easy it is to read something. The index is not a new idea. As early as the 1880s, an English professor named L.A. Sherman had noticed that writers in his era had average sentences of roughly 23 words, which was in contrast with the 50 word sentences of Elizabethan times.

After Sherman, several books were published on readability and how to make your writing more concise. Finally, in 1943, Rudolf Flesch published Marks of a Readable Style, which included formulas for readability that are still used today. There are several different formulas out there, but Flesch’s is one of the most widely used. If you go into a website’s back-end, specifically in Wordpress, you can often find a Flesch meter to rate the writing in your website posts.

One of the most popular versions of the Flesch formula, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, gives you a grade level for reading. With a grade level attached to the difficulty of reading a book or article, it’s easier for educators to judge what’s appropriate.

The Hemingway app is not a new concept, but it is another step in the ever-changing world of writing. Websites like read-able.com offer the same kind of service, even going as far as to judge writing by the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Score, Coleman Liau Index, and Automated Readability Index formulas. A notable difference is that the Hemingway app looks like it may become a desktop program, capable of opening and reading entire text files, and there’s a good chance it could continue to several other platforms from there.