Hemingweek

For some weird reason, Hemingway’s name has popped up a lot this week. I have been reading The Old Man and the Sea, but that’s not really what this post is about.

Even though it looks like it was released back in August, I only learned about a web app called Hemingway this week (H/T Gabriel Furtado). The idea is simple: Put in text and see where you can simplify your prose. Built on Boostrap, the app will analyze one’s prose and determine which sentences are hard—or very hard—to read, if one uses too many adverbs or the passive voice in excess. A readability inspector also displays the overall level required to read the piece, according to school grades. I need to share this with my writers.

Later this week, I was checking Tiny Big Details, a great UX/UI blog created and curated by Floris Dekker and Andrew McCarthy. One post caught my eye: Draft offers a Hemingway mode that prevents you to delete a word once it’s typed (inspired by a quote often attributed to Hemingway: “Write drunk; edit sober.”) What a great feature! It is a bit confusing at first but after a while, it feels quite liberating not to worry about typos, or bad writing—in the drafting stage.

On a side note, following Editorially’s announcement that they will be shutting down on May 30 (so sad), I am glad to have found in Draft a light web-based writer that supports Markdown and will let me synch files with Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, etc. Give it a try.