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Comment by heydenberk | Hacker News Reader

Read your writing out loud to yourself, carefully observing the punctuation. You won't become Hemingway, but you will find the most obvious flaws in your writing.

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+1 to this --- and I should add, it needs to be actually out loud. No, reading it in your head doesn't work.

If you have an office rubber duck, reading your report to the duck is a really good way to get feedback.

The only problem with this technique is that people start dropping in commas everywhere they'd take a breath. It's a pretty good approach, otherwise.

Excess commas seems to be an especially US problem. Here in Norway one of my sons had Norwegian teacher of English who studied in America. We often had to point out that half the commas she wanted in his writing were unnecessary.

I have that habit, though not because I read my stuff out loud and use pauses as an indicator for comma placement. It just reads better to me, with having "semi-separators" that I don't quite feel justify a separate sentence, but help with the flow of what's being said.

Looks like I did it twice just now.

I like to paste things into this as well...

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

Have you ever tried Hemingway's own works with that? It is... instructive[1].

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416

Read your writing out aloud. Carefully observing the meter of the verse.

You won't become Hemingway. But you will seem quite odd to nearby work mates.

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