Using Hemingway or Other Editors

I just finished and submitted a story. This time I ran it through Hemingway to see the results. It came out pretty good.

Gr 4, 60 out of 64 possible adverbs, passive voice was like 18 out of a possible 110, 35 sentences were rated difficult out of 523 and 20 or so rated very difficult.

This time I worked with the story. Got the adverbs down to 54, 20 very difficult down to zero and the difficult sentences down to 18.

I felt that was pretty good. But reading the story after I felt the sentences were too choppy. It seemed like anything over about 6-8 words got rated difficult. And by the time it was up to 20 or more...

It just didn't seem like ME after. I've submitted it for publishing because I'm interested in what the readers have to say but I'd like to know your experience.

How do you find these editors. Is there a better one than Hemingway? Is it more important to sound like yourself or get the structure right? Any other information or comments you might have are welcome.

gordo12 said:

How do you find these editors. Is there a better one than Hemingway? Is it more important to sound like yourself or get the structure right? Any other information or comments you might have are welcome.

Click to expand...

I never use anything other than the basic Word spell/grammar checker, and even then, mostly ignore the "suggestions" - I use it to find the dumb errors only.

Using something like this might end up grammatically perfect, and that's fine for business writing, but to have a bot dictate style "rules" to me, for fiction? No way. We'd all become bland and homogenised, and who wants that?

I think it's more important to sound like yourself - with the proviso that you've got the basic competencies under control.

gordo12 said:

How do you find these editors. Is there a better one than Hemingway? Is it more important to sound like yourself or get the structure right? Any other information or comments you might have are welcome.

Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with Hemingway, except that I feel like I read most of what he wrote.

I have used the old "style" and "diction" tools that give similar feedback. You have to figure out where you want to be on their scale. If the software says that some sentence is hard to read, then read it with that in mind. Don't change it unless you agree. You pick the level you want to write at, not the software.

You learn by doing it. My stories often grade out at fifth grade or lower. I'm fine with that, but in response I've adjusted my editing a little to allow longer and more complex sentences. I don't need to write at a fifth grade level.

I haven't checked in a while. Maybe I'll run my latest through "style" and see if I've changed.

Edit:

I'm good with it. My dialog is still simple. My reading level in passages that aren't dialog-heavy is up to where it probably should be. My passive sentences are down.

I've read the damn thing enough times. I already knew that I was happy with it.

All automated tools suck, but some suck less than others. I find ProWritingAid helpful. Unlike Grammarly and others, you can set it for creative writing plus it tries to check pacing, style and other issues geared to fiction, including sentence length analysis. Try the free version, but it's inexpensive and can be installed on multiple machines (it's licensed per user, not per computer)

Other than that, Slickwrite, Scribens, Expresso, LanguageTool and After the Deadline all provide a robot's-eye-view of your writing.

Like EB and NotWise say, all these robots can spot most spelling and grammar errors, but your writing is your own. Don't let them push you around with their suggestions about style and metrics.

No, I don't use any grammar-assist programs.

electricblue66 said:

I never use anything other than the basic Word spell/grammar checker, and even then, mostly ignore the "suggestions" - I use it to find the dumb errors only.

Using something like this might end up grammatically perfect, and that's fine for business writing, but to have a bot dictate style "rules" to me, for fiction? No way. We'd all become bland and homogenised, and who wants that?

I think it's more important to sound like yourself - with the proviso that you've got the basic competencies under control.

Click to expand...

I'll just copy what EB said. Mostly just run them for the dumb stuff, which is helpful. I've also used the audio read function, which can be helpful...but it's usually just easier to read it aloud myself. A beta-reader is also helpful. (a creative editor might be nice...but I'm not there yet )

I like tabbed text editors. I favor CuteHTML on an older machine, and Jarte with its WordWeb dictionary-thesaurus on my current laptop. I run texts through Word 2004 for basic spell+grammar checks but I mostly depend on experience.

Back before Windoze, I ran texts through a DOS complexity checker. (Who here remembers MS-DOS?) What reader education level should I aim for? I've not bothered with that since the Bill Clinton years. Maybe I should find an app and see just how out-of-touch the machine says I am.

Hypoxia said:

Maybe I should find an app and see just how out-of-touch the machine says I am.

Click to expand...

There are many online text-checking tools. This one for instance, or any number of others. You take a few paragraphs from your text and paste it into their window, tell it to go, and it gives you an opinion or two.

NotWise said:

There are many online text-checking tools. This one for instance, or any number of others. You take a few paragraphs from your text and paste it into their window, tell it to go, and it gives you an opinion or two.

Click to expand...

I dropped five thousand words into one of these "style" evaluators. It told me that if the piece was non-fiction, it had good active voice and a masculine style. But if it was fiction, the same text was deemed to have a feminine voice. Go figure.

How the algorithm parses gender into the equation was beyond me - probably mostly bollocks. But then, several folk recently have been surprised, reading my content, that I'm a man. Attuned to my feminine side, it would appear .

I was looking around at other editors yesterday and the info on one site astonished me. Apparently some of these text input sites (plagiarism etc) have little blurbs in their T&C allowing them to resell your text if you use their service.

It's getting to be an endless con game

Okay so here's how I do it:



I start writing in Hemingway. On the "write" function instead of "edit" cause nobody needs to see all that red when you're first getting it down.



So when I'm "done" writing the story, there are usually huge gaps with lots of scenes missing. I skip around. Lots of jarring transitions. I'm not worried about them yet. I go ahead and click it on over to "edit" mode.



Hemingway is a program on a computer, it doesn't get to tell me what to do. It doesn't get to tell YOU what to do. It's a robot and until they recognize and connect to the printer, rise up, and start guzzling coffee and crying at bars.. the writing is up to us.



I change the words in my head. Instead of "difficult to read" I think it's "way too fucking long." Because sometimes really long sentences are good as long as they're coherent. My problem is I'll have three subject changes in a long, long sentence. It's nice for that to be highlighted so I can look at it closer. When I'm re-reading for the fourth time, I won't pay attention to how long a sentence is. I just won't. Highlighted is good. I ask myself: Is this conveying one piece of information? Is this about one subject? And if it isn't, and trust me it isn't -- I'm a wordy son-o-bitch, I hack it up into different sentences BUT I vary those sentences. I try to vary them at least. Some of my writing is very choppy sometimes. Happens.



Highlighting adverbs is both nice and mean. Cause now you see when you have ten of them in three paragraphs but I don't believe in jailing adverbs. Beautifully written pieces can have what the program would classify as "holy shit, dial it down." I spent my early twenties, jailing those adverbs and barring description. "Fuck it all!" I said. "Fuck you, where are we?" my readers said. The goal is not to get down to zero. You don't want zero. You don't want to harshly snap the slender throats of all those lovely adverbs. Unless there are too many and your brain starts to catch on them or they feel in the way, then get to snapping. In the words of the great Mary karr, "bastards need killing." Be aware of adverbs. If you think they make the sentence better? Make it more vivid? Terrific. Keep 'em. Tell Hemingway to bite your lovely, adverb-using ass. Laugh at the suggestions. That dumbass computer program doesn't know art.



*



Then I take the whole thing over to Grammarly and check it for spelling mistakes/grammar mistakes. Once again, double check to make sure that's what your story needs. I'm southern, I write with a southern tone and sometimes I use the wrong tense, the wrong word. But at the end of the day? I'm southern. This story was written by somebody southern. I've spent way too much of my life agonizing about whether speaking in the way I was taught to speak, by incredibly smart and warm people, made me sound stupid. It doesn't. This is how I speak and it's fine. It's fantastic.



*



After Grammarly, I use this lovely little site called homophonecheck. It just highlights all the homophones so you can quickly check that you aren't using the wrong word.



*



Finally, I put it into word cause I trust its grammar/spell check more than pages. And I read it. Where it's missing a scene I add a little: [And here's where he fucks her in the butt.] and I write those scenes and do a quick re-check, re-run through of the list.



At the very, very end. The Final edit before I post or send it out to somebody who paid for it, I make my computer read it. Just so I can hear it. I highlight a few paragraphs at a time and laugh like hell when my computer says "oh daddy" and the pronunciation of "cum" in robot land is coom. So that's great.



And I'm done.



*



And you know what really, really sucks? Shit still gets through. Fuck.



*



Does this all seem really tedious? It probably is. Other people's editing routines seem tedious to me as well. This is what I've developed for myself when I was ghostwriting erotica for people and I needed to write a story in a few hours and edit it quickly. And it works for me.



My goal with using these programs is to narrow down the time I spend *actually* editing in word. I want to fix the sentence lengths, the words I use, make boring sentences better. I don't want to be fixing homophones. I can write a story in a day but I will edit for a month. I don't want to do that.



Anyhow, that's how I use programs. Sometimes I throw it all out the window and write it on my typewriter and edit it with a fat, black marker, white out, and pens. Try all sorts of things. Some stories require different editing routines. Feel them out. I try to make the whole editing process feel like I'm some word gathering, bespectacled, niche scientist. I think, "Of course I fucking know how to do this I'ma gosh damned niche scientist with these thick spectacles for niche science work. It's very important. Leave me alone."



Trust yourself.

Oh, okay one last thing, the grade Hemingway gives you? Unless you want to type like an asshole, ignore it. Type really big words into Hemingway without any small words. Just an unreadable shit sentence. Congrats, you've just wrote a Hemingway certified college-graduate of a sentence. That part is just broken nonsense.