Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Back in 1922, the 23 year old Ernest Hemmingway, a then unknown unpublished writer, asked his wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, to join him in Lausanne. For reasons unknown, his wife packed all his writings into a suitcase and brought it along. Possibly because she was sick, or maybe in a hurry, she packed everything: originals, and carbon copies. At the station, she left the bags unattended to buy something. When she returned, the bags were gone… and so too were Hemmingway’s writings. All his works were lost. If asked for the learnings from this incident, most of us would list what we could learn from Hemmingway: not give up, resilience, picking oneself up, continue doing what one had been trying… you get the idea. And we miss the other side, writes Shane Parrish: “But almost everyone misses the lessons—hiding in plain sight—offered by Hadley. And when it comes to avoiding catastrophic errors, we should pay close attention.” The lesson from Hadley is subtle, not th...

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 t...