

The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The first was the lovely opening of Out of Africa by Isak Dinisen (Karen Blixen): I decided to enter two of my favorite pieces of English prose to see how they rated. It should evaluate you (grade level, quality of writing, and types of errors) as you write, or you can hit “write” if that doesn’t work to see how it fares. Just go to the site, either cut the prose on the page or paste your own over it. You can check either your own writing or that of others. And how does Papa rate? Mediocre at best: a passage from “My Old Man” was rated “bad,” while passages from “The Old Man and the Sea” (a nice starting paragraph) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” were judged just “OK.” Apparently Hemingway wasn’t such a good prose stylist, at least according to his eponymous app. Now, however, it’s become notorious, for the people at Language Log have actually run Hemingway’s prose through the Hemingway program. It’s supposed to help you learn to write better. The program at issue is the Hemingway App, which has apparently achieved some renown for being able to parse writing and suss out the awkwardness, the passive voices, the over-use of adverbs, and so on. Pasting is also iffy: it’ll make the screen jump to an odd location in the text.Īnd then there are bugs.Oh well, another technical failure: the inability of computer programs to judge the quality of writing. Still, they only work on list elements, and only for a single level in either direction. For example, the outdent and indent buttons are on the same level as all other formatting controls. More often than not, you just want it in your clipboard.

And speaking of exports, an on-screen view of the export would be much better than a file-based export. To get HTML output, you go to Save As, while getting MD or Docx requires going to File -> Export. There’s also the inconsistency of the UI. Not a big problem, but it can be distracting. This is especially true on larger bodies of text. Having to switch is distracting and breaks the writing flow.Īlso due to CKEditor, the browser’s spellchecker isn’t triggered immediately after a misspelling. A counter is very, very useful when writing articles that have a length range. First, the word counter is only visible in Edit mode, not in Write mode. Further, saving a file with Save As will actually not acknowledge the save, and will warn the user about unsaved changes.Īside from the lack of Markdown support, there are also minor UI/UX gripes. So saving a file as MD, or even trying to open one that is MD, simply isn’t available. The editor features a Save As option, and although it does let users save a file with any extension they desire, it will not open these files. Naturally, this is not so and can lead to confusion. Thus, it gives its (non technical) users the impression that links will open in new tabs when exported to MD. For example, MD doesn’t support the target attribute in links (i.e. A lot of other information gets lost in the export process, too. The editor does support export to MD, but without images and code, so there’s little point to it for my workflow.
HEMINGWAY EDITOR 2 CODE
It’s a pity there’s no support for code snippets, either. The app is also coupled with a built-in spellchecker for several English dialects. Typical fixes include shorter sentences, active instead of passive voice, and fewer adverbs. It keeps an eye on one’s phrasing and sentence structure, and suggests fixes. It is where tools like Hemingway can help most. This, in turn, prevents the wasting of time. Automation allows editors to focus more on content and code. So it’s important to be able to automate as much of the low-mental-effort work as possible. There’s formatting, language corrections, image processing, code testing, syntax highlights, and more. This may not be obvious, but a lot goes into making the drafts publishable. Hundreds of emails and dozens of drafts fly before my eyes every week. Now, a year later, our resident PHP editor Bruno Skvorc takes a look at Hemingway Editor 2 to see how it stacks up-particularly from a technical writer’s point of view.Īs SitePoint’s editor for the PHP channel, I deal with a lot of text. At the time, Jacco decided he’d rather stick with the online version of Hemingway-not least because of a display bug in the desktop version. In 2014, Jacco Blankenspoor took a look at Hemingway Editor’s new desktop app.
