Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test(newyorker.com)

52 points by route66 12 years ago | 18 comments

syllogism 12 years ago |

What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard.

The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback.

Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art is always going to break all the rules and invert expectations.

This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules!

Calling the app "Hemmingway" brands the app beautifully, and gets people engaged...unfortunately the engagement is jumping all over it for something it was never supposed to do.

I think there's good potential for style linting, it's a really under-explored area. And I think probably the app's rules, as implemented in this alpha, aren't that much up to scratch. You'd at least want to run a POS tagger, and probably a parser, to give better feedback.

So long as the heuristics are _correlated_ with common style problems, you can get some use out of the app. But apparently that's a difficult story to tell.

egh 12 years ago | |

These language features are not correlated with style problems. There is no evidence that they are. These are folk remedies for bad writing.

On the passive voice, see: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 and many, many more articles on that blog.

On adverbs:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/02/20/being-an-...

and on adverb hunting via software:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004271.h...

and on this app:

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

patrickphilips 12 years ago | | |

I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait:

"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."

syllogism 12 years ago | | |

Yeah, I'm well familiar with languagelog.

I noted that I thought the app's logic probably wasn't "up to scratch" as is --- I'm inclined to be a bit charitable, given the direction of the criticism the app's getting.

tommo123 12 years ago | |

I think anyone who brands themselves in such a manner -- namely, to purport to be something they're not -- is a duplicitous, deceitful deceiver, and has no place in honest business. This is the worst outrage since that time I spend $500 on an apple and this punk kid handed me some shiny telephone in a box. I wanted an apple, junior, not some slab of glass and plastic. Your jedi mind tricks won't work on me.

ivansavz 12 years ago |

Way to go Adam (http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long) for getting covered in The New Yorker!

If it is no secret: did you get in touch with them or did they seek you out? Did you have a press kit[1] ready, or was this done on the fly?

I'd also be interested to hear about the technology you're using, and how it compares to the pattern-based approach of LanguageTool, e.g.,[2].

[1] http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-pre... [2] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master...

gabemart 12 years ago | |

That was also my first thought. A real achievement for this kind of launch.

I would be super, super interested to hear some rough stats for referral traffic if they founders would be willing to share.

meepmorp 12 years ago |

For a slightly less tolerant review of the app's behavior (generally, and on Hemingway specifically) check out Mark Liberman's take here:

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

acqq 12 years ago | |

As soon as I saw the app description (it detects passive voice, counts adverbs, long words and long sentences as the bad thing etc) I've expected such results: HemingwayApp grades real Hemingway's writing as "bad."

I applaud Mark Liberman for the tag "Prescriptivist poppycock."

I still wait for somebody to actually pass one whole Hemingway's novel through the app and tell us about the results. Probably the new insights await us, once we analyze the dynamics of the "badness" inside of the real novel.

csense 12 years ago |

Why do people want to emulate Hemingway's style?

He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school.

If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quality was kinda mediocre-to-poor.

Dickens, OTOH, is a master of language -- creating long and complex sentences, filled of description and analogy, which have a rich diversity of adjectives and adverbs, creating a descriptive, witty prose.

I've never understood why people like Hemingway.

pewallin 12 years ago | |

Well, he is widely regarded as one of the best writers of all time and among other things won the Nobel prize in literature http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/.... Don't mistake brevity for simplicity. Btw, If you are just starting out I highly recommend The Sun Also Rises.

acqq 12 years ago | | |

Have you ever thought about the possibility that the Nobel prizes aren't always fully rational or narrowly focused and that there are different motives involved? Hemingway had the novels that widely resonated. Sometimes the writing style or technical details aren't too important when you consider the work as the whole.

JacobAldridge 12 years ago |

I am reminded of a cafe I walked past in Spain, possibly Toledo. Above the front door a sign declared "Ernest Hemingway never ate here".

pjmorris 12 years ago | |

I have a feeling Mr. Hemingway would approve.

midgetjones 12 years ago |

Hemingway's most important rule is difficult to parse for a web app:

"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tr...

kelvin0 12 years ago |

I'm glad to this important headline is still on HN after all these days!