The first article is after the Hemingway app. Take a look at these two articles on humour in foreign languages. I also wondered how the Hemingway app scale would compare to Yoast’s scale.Īn example of before and after Hemingway app Now that I’ve discovered the Hemingway app, I returned to one of my previous posts to see whether I could improve the readability of any of the articles in English on my website. They will click an article away and move on to something else. On the Internet, if people find something hard to read, they won’t stay on the page. The Hemingway seems more suitable for articles that are trying to please Google. The Hemingway app isn’t suggesting we ban them altogether. Some, including Ian Crouch of the New Yorker, have already reviewed the Hemingway app with Hemingway’s prose and concluded that there are times when Hemingway, along with the rest of us, should use adverbs and passive voice. Clearly the Hemingway app’s algorithm doesn’t pick up whether vocabulary is made-up or real. Despite my calculation that about 12% of the vocabulary in the Jabberwocky is made up, the Hemingway app gave the piece a Grade One reading level. Words such as: brillig, slithy, mome, outgrabe, toves, gimble, and wabe. The other made-up words never gained such status. A borogove is a ‘shabby-looking bird with feathers sticking up all around’. Two other words, borogove and uffish, have made it into urban dictionaries. One of those words, galumph, is now in the dictionary as a combination of ‘gallop and triumph’.

So I also tried the 167-word poem, which includes many made-up words. Using the Hemingway app, Simon Ager tried the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. When I tried it for one of my Greek articles, it must have been all Greek to the app. If you don’t use it for English, it won’t feature adverbs, passive voice or simpler alternatives. The Hemingway app seems to be able to determine how difficult sentences are to read based on the number of words in a sentence. If we use the app in a language that uses Latin script, it will still show which sentences are hard to read and which are very hard to read. Just for fun, I tried to use it for Portuguese and Greek to see what would happen.

As for the other three measurements, the Hemingway App counts them up and suggests that we eliminate verbosity and long sentences where possible. The app also seeks to limit usage of the passive voice to once every 100 words. Adverbs should be limited to about one per 100 words or so. So what are the criteria that the Hemingway app uses and how did it help me bring my article from a Grade 12 to a Grade 8 reading level? The Hemingway app uses an algorithm with the following measurements: adverbs, passive voice, simple phrases, hard-to-read sentences, and very hard-to-read sentences. In other contexts, we would be better off with a human proofreader, especially for academic papers and literary works. In this context the Hemingway app helped fix the problem. Yoast published a compelling article explaining why online content should be clear and easy to read, from a standpoint of search engine optimisation. In the context of helping somebody make an article more readable for online publication, the Hemingway app seems to do the job. Before long, I improved the readability of the article so an eighth grader could understand it. The app said that I was writing for Grade 12 and that I had a lot of sentences that were very hard to read. So downloaded the Hemingway App to my computer. The chief suggested I use the Hemingway App to clean up the article.

I needed to go back and make it more readable. After having published more than a dozen articles with them, suddenly one of my posts didn’t meet the publication’s standards. The other day I wrote an article for an online publication. The Hemingway App and Writing Clear Online Content

Hemingway editor.