Hemmingway v/s Hemmingway

There’s this app called Hemmingway that evaluates your composition and grades it on a scale from 1 to 10. Its aim?

“Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear.”

It shows its results by color coding the text you entered:

-         Yellow for “long, complex sentences”;

-         Red to mean the “sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic”;

-         Blue for adverbs: “Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead”, the app recommends;

-         Purple where a simpler word might do e.g. “use” instead of “utilize”;

-         Green to indicate use of the passive voice.

(You could disagree with some of the points in some contexts, but surely as a rule of thumb, most of them do make sense. And the app is free, so what do you expect?)

Keeping in mind that the smartphone generation may not be all that much into long form writing (texts and tweets may be their preferred mode), the app has a desktop version as well!

Mark Liberman gave the “original” Hemmingway’s passages as input to the app. Here’s the first paragraph of Hemingway's story, My Old Man:

“I guess looking at it now my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn't his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he'd pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He'd have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo's skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o'clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I'd help him pull off his boots and he'd get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we'd start out.”

And the app rated it: “Bad”. Its reasons?

“1 of 3 sentences are hard to read.

2 of 3 sentences are very hard to read.”

My eyes did glaze when I tried to read that paragraph above! Hell, I couldn’t even finish reading it: it was that hard to read. Saying that the app is wrong because Hemmingway wrote the passage is like saying everything Hemmingway wrote must be great just because he wrote it! So I would agree with the app on this one.