Hemingway App Helps You Cut the Crap

       "The first draft of anything is sh*t"- Ernest Hemingway    

As a human, you use language to get many of your points across.    

But for technical humans, language is often a barrier, not a bridge.    

When you use technical language, it creates demands on your audiences. This makes them less likely to stay with you.    

Hemingway App can help you solve that problem. It's a free tool that helps you simplify your language. It's named after the author, who was famous for his short, simple sentences.    

You can find it here.    

Let's have a look.    

I copied some text from the landing page for Siemens Xcelerator- a platform that helps customers with digital transformation. I pasted the text into Hemingway:    

Hemingway analyses the text and gives it a readability score. The lower the score, the easier it is to read.    

This text scored 14- "post-graduate"- which means it takes a lot of brain power to follow and understand.    

Bear in mind that this score is for native speakers- for non-natives, it will be even harder.    

(You can find an explanation of how Hemingway creates the score, and why, here.)    

Hemingway highlights the areas it finds problematic, using a colour code system. This text is full of red, indicating very hard-to-read sentences.    

We can use the breakdown to re-write the text with live feedback: here's my first pass. I shortened the sentences with some full stops, and reorganised a bit:    

This has already made a big difference. To improve readability further, we'd need to re-word things and cut down jargon.    

Of course, there's more to good writing than readability, and Hemingway is just a tool. You can, and should, ignore some of its suggestions. We also need creative "flair" and good copywriting to bring our words to life.    

Finally, you can also use Hemingway to polish the scripts of your talks, pitches and presentations.    

PS: in case you're wondering what the Hemingway score for this article is, it's 5. And yes, I re-wrote it multiple times!    

PPS: This isn't a sponsored post. I just like the tool.    

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