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Comment by TravisLS | Hacker News Reader

I like the Hemingway app, but it is very much designed to make you write like Hemingway (ie short, clear sentences _only_). Obviously most great writing is not in this style.

The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or if you happen to like that style. It is hardly the universal arbiter of "poor or confusing writing".

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Oh wow it's almost completely okay with Hemingway. I pasted some of his work in and it had almost no complaint at all. Good point.

I was coming to say the same, and the descriptors being removed actually just points mote to its usefulness for writing 'in a Hemingway style'.

However, having said that I don't think the author of this article used it well, as for many reasons most any journalistic article is going to be very descriptive and use things like puns to get/maintain a reader's attention (something I personally usually hate, but not always).

I think it would be fun to create a version of this which pushes writing towards other recognizable styles like Raymond Chandler or David Foster Wallace. Maybe you pick a style from a dropdown and the analysis changes. You could possibly take it even further and automate some transformations of the input to stylize a piece of writing.

To satisfy a DFW style it'd need to understand 2 page long sentences with multiple footnotes per sentence. Haha. It would be a fun one to do though! (I say that loving DFW)

It's Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog but for creative writing.

When it comes to newspapers isn't this the goal, though? Hemingway's writing is journalistic writing. "The [Kansas City] Star’s style guide formed the basis for his own style that ran against the elaborate tendencies of 19th century writers."[1] So if you're judging the style of a journalist's writing a preferable guide is how similar to Hemingway it is.

[1] https://mediahq.com/famous-authors-also-journalists/

I would say, no not really. The goal is to make writing readable to human, not same as Hemingway wrote. Those are two different goals, despite Hemingway being also readable.

Practically, I don't have problem to understand American major newspapers.

> elaborate tendencies of 19th century writers.

reminded - on some estate sale here in US i randomly picked up and opened a small end-of-19th century book of some American writer that i never heard (that just means that it is definitely not a Tier-1 writer as i'm not an American). The first large paragraph consisted of just 2, yet pretty large, multipart sentences with several great ideas and observations masterfully woven together. I was awestruck. In Russia we call it "Tolstoy" (War and Peace) style and that beat even the Tolstoy. I immediately closed the book, quietly put it back. It was a very uncomfortable reminder of what we lost. The times has changed.

There are plenty of writers - I know several - that seem to think Hemingway's style is the "correct" one. And it may be, for business use-cases, where clarity is more important than beauty, insight, nuance, individuality, or consonance with the meaning of the text.

You will write like a dog for no good reason.

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