The Hemingway Editor Guides Authors in Improving Readability
A friend recently turned me on to the Hemingway Editor, a nifty online tool to assist writers in improving our work. The website says, “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. It’s like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose.”
It’s simple to use. Go to the website and paste some writing into the text window. The software analyzes the writing and reports on what it finds:
Grade Level: The Hemingway Editor uses a standard readability algorithm to assess the U.S. grade level. It goes as low as a fifth grade and says the average American reads at grade ten.
Stats: Hemingway reports on the number of paragraphs, sentences, words, and characters, as well as the time it takes to read the text.
The Number of Hard Sentences: Each sentence that is hard to read is highlighted in tan.
The number of Very Hard Sentences: More critical than hard to read sentences are very hard sentences, which are color-coded as reddish-brown.
Phrases with Simpler Alternatives: I often type “implement” when “use” is a better choice. Hemingway points these out in violet. Hover over the violet word or phrase and Hemingway will show you the preferred alternative.
Number of Adverbs: While we don’t need to remove all adverbs, Hemingway will point them all out and tell us the maximum acceptable number for our piece. Adverbs are in light blue.
The number of Passive Sentences: Once the king of passive sentences, I trained myself away from them. Still, they pop up and Hemingway points out the passive voice in pale green horror.
Armed with this color-coded input it is easy to visually see where to make changes to increase our work’s readability. The adverbs and simpler alternatives are quick to fix.
In general, the hard and very hard sentences are correctable by rewriting complex and compound sentences into shorter, simpler sentences. That leaves a passive voice, which takes some practice to reword. The good news is that having some adverbs and passive sentences are okay.
We can edit in the Hemingway window, which updates its analysis in real-time. As we make changes, the grade level decreases, meaning the piece is more readable. Also, the various highlighted colors disappear. While editing it to become colorless may make for rather bland, fifth grade-level reading, less color is preferred.
Using the Hemingway Editor is a quick, easy, and fun way to improve our writing readability.
The Hemingway Editor results for the above text are:
- Grade Level: 8
- Stats: 14 paragraphs, 31 sentences, and 426 words. The reading time is 1:42.
- Hard Sentences: 7
- Very Hard Sentences: 3
- Phrases with Simpler Alternatives: 5
- Adverbs: 1
- Passive Voice: 2, having 6 is acceptable
I’m tempted to edit this post in Hemingway to make it more readable, but I think I’ll leave it as is so you can see the unedited version.
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Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is a full-time, career author. He’s published scores of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of blog posts, with experience as a publisher, editor, and commercial freelance writer. A passionate wordsmith, his goal is to change the world one word at a time. Learn more at PeterLyleDeHaan.com.
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