The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback.
Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art is always going to break all the rules and invert expectations.
This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules!
Calling the app "Hemmingway" brands the app beautifully, and gets people engaged...unfortunately the engagement is jumping all over it for something it was never supposed to do.
I think there's good potential for style linting, it's a really under-explored area. And I think probably the app's rules, as implemented in this alpha, aren't that much up to scratch. You'd at least want to run a POS tagger, and probably a parser, to give better feedback.
So long as the heuristics are _correlated_ with common style problems, you can get some use out of the app. But apparently that's a difficult story to tell.
On the passive voice, see: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 and many, many more articles on that blog.
On adverbs:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/02/20/being-an-...
and on adverb hunting via software:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004271.h...
and on this app:
"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."
I noted that I thought the app's logic probably wasn't "up to scratch" as is --- I'm inclined to be a bit charitable, given the direction of the criticism the app's getting.
If it is no secret: did you get in touch with them or did they seek you out? Did you have a press kit[1] ready, or was this done on the fly?
I'd also be interested to hear about the technology you're using, and how it compares to the pattern-based approach of LanguageTool, e.g.,[2].
[1] http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-pre... [2] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master...
I would be super, super interested to hear some rough stats for referral traffic if they founders would be willing to share.
I applaud Mark Liberman for the tag "Prescriptivist poppycock."
I still wait for somebody to actually pass one whole Hemingway's novel through the app and tell us about the results. Probably the new insights await us, once we analyze the dynamics of the "badness" inside of the real novel.
He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school.
If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quality was kinda mediocre-to-poor.
Dickens, OTOH, is a master of language -- creating long and complex sentences, filled of description and analogy, which have a rich diversity of adjectives and adverbs, creating a descriptive, witty prose.
I've never understood why people like Hemingway.
"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tr...
