What about the famously spare early story “The End of Something”? It performs significantly better: Yet, as Hemingway’s paragraphs go, that is perhaps a bit twisty. (It may have a point there: Doesn’t the fact that everyone had left but one man suggest just how late it was?) The second sentence is “hard to read” and the third is “very hard to read.” Maybe it’s the shifting perspective? No adverbs, though. That “very” in the first sentence might have been cut. Hemingway rates merely “O.K.” (Grade 15). The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.īad news. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.
It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. The app suggests that anything under Grade 10 is a sign of “bold, clear writing.”īold and clear, that’s the popular image of the Hemingway persona-the kind of man, as Lillian Ross observed in her Profile of him for The New Yorker, who could walk into an Abercrombie & Fitch store, and, being approached by a sales clerk, say, simply, “Want to see coat.” And Hemingway’s notes to himself from Cuba show a parallel artistic imperative: the search for blunt, descriptive, concise prose. Hemingway uses a formula to judge the “reading level” of a particular selection of writing, which the Longs said is “a measure of how complex the sentence structure is and how big the words you’re using are.” It scored my first paragraph as Grade 14.
The app is free, and the brothers are working, in their off hours, on a desktop version, as well as an extension for Web browsers. Hemingway launched in September, and gained wide notice this week after it was shared on Hacker News. They collaborated online, with Adam doing the coding and Ben figuring out the writing rules. “While complaining about it on the phone, we decided there should be an easy way to help people realize when their writing was too dense,” they said. His brother Ben, twenty-two, is a copywriter in New York. Our text was more clear and persuasive when we kept it simple.” Adam, who is twenty-five, works in marketing in North Carolina. “The worst part is we didn’t realize we were doing it. “After spending our days writing, we realized a common mistake: sentences easily grow to the point that they became difficult to understand,” the Longs told me on Wednesday in an e-mail. It also calls out adverbs (“newly,” “famously, “”seemingly”), difficult-to-read sentences (the first being “very” hard to read, while the second was just hard), and instances of the passive voice. The above paragraph scored an “O.K.” in Hemingway, an app, created by the brothers Adam and Ben Long, which analyzes text and, as it promises, “makes your writing bold and clear.” The program highlights overly complicated words and suggests alternatives (my “all of it” could have simply been “all”). One reads: “You can phrase things clearer and better.” And the other: “You can remove words which are unnecessary and tighten up your prose.” Amid the collection, McGrath identifies two notes that Hemingway had seemingly written to himself, in pencil. This week, in the Times, Charles McGrath wrote about a newly digitized collection of ephemera from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, which confirms that the famously terse writer was, as McGrath says, “a hoarder.” Ticket stubs, telegrams, Christmas cards, diary entries-all of it amassed in the twenty-plus years that Hemingway kept his house there.
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