Hemingway App with MG prose?

heza

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So from time to time, the Hemingway App is brought up on the forum. I've seen it, I've played with it, and I've mostly dismissed it as just a novelty.

I don't really care to write like Hemingway, and I don't think an algorithm like this can actually determine too, too much about your writing style or which styles are preferable. It doesn't really think, you know? It knows how many words are in a sentence and identifies punctuation and parts of speech, but it can't tell anything about the artistry of a sentence.

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

When I played with it, previously, I was copying in text from my YA and adult works. Recently, mention of the app popped up in a blog I follow, and I decided it'd be fun to play with it again. This time, since I'm writing MG, I used text from my MG work.

I found the results really interesting. I've been having a problem with MG style and simplifying my sentence structure. I've gotten comments that my narrative still reads adult at times. And I think the app actually helped with some of that.

It highlights adverbs you probably don't need and words you can probably delete (I use "very" and "nearly" a lot when I shouldn't, it turns out). It also highlights long sentences: yellow for "hard to read" sentences and "red" for very hard to read sentences. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the sentence is actually hard to read; it just means it has more phrases and punctuation than the algorithm thinks is strictly necessary. There were a few sentences that I like the structure of and want to leave as is... but there were several sentences it highlighted that I looked at again and made some edits on. It wasn't that they were hard to read or too complex, though. It was that they weren't terribly well written to begin with.

So as a tool for writing like Hemingway or writing well, in general, I'm not sure it's useful. But I do actually see some usefulness in writing MG, where making sure the prose is clean and straightforward and uncomplicated is a bit more of a consideration.

Has anyone tried it with MG prose (or is anyone willing to give it a run)? Do you feel like it told you anything about your writing?
 

_city_

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Wow, this is great. I just put in a fat chunk of text and it helped me clean it up quick. I had a few adverbs that I didn't realize were extraneous until they were highlighted in blue and popping out. I had two convoluted sentences that got Ernie's approval after I put them through the ringer.

I don't think everything needs to be trimmed as heartily as this app suggests, but for the most part (though I've only just taken a look) it seems like a very helpful preliminary editing process.
 

heza

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I don't think everything needs to be trimmed as heartily as this app suggests, but for the most part (though I've only just taken a look) it seems like a very helpful preliminary editing process.

Yeah, I mean I wouldn't start changing anything with blind obedience to the app. But it did isolate a few sentences for me to think about that I wasn't seeing in the overall flow of the narrative.