Write Like Hemingway

People buy from people they know, like, and trust. One of the best ways for people to get to know you better is reading articles that communicate your expertise. Learning to write is a skill that will help you sell more insurance.

Hemingway App is a tool that will help you be a better writer by providing you with a virtual editor. It works like this: You paste a copy of whatever piece of writing you want to have reviewed into an Edit field. The site analyzes your content and color-codes it, highlighting the problems a live editor might find and assigning it a numerical grade for overall readability.

• Red denotes a passage that is too long, too complex. You should break the sentences up into shorter sentences.
• Yellow means you’ve committed a common type of error, such as a grammatical error.
• Green shows you have lapsed into the passive (i.e., unmanly) voice: “She was kissed by him” is not as good — as judged by the app — as “He kissed her.”
• Blue highlights adverbs, which, by definition, are bad. Hemingway didn’t use them. Neither should you. Relentlessly cut them out of your content.

Hemingway App was created by two brothers — Adam and Ben Long, both writers. Adam is a product manager for a Raleigh, Durham, software creator. Ben is a copywriter for a Manhattan ad agency.

They both realized they had the same frustration. When you write under deadline pressure, you write so much that your brain turns off. You want to get it done more than you want to get it right. Too many adverbs? Your brain ignores them. So they came up with a platform that provides writers with a second set of eyes that reviews what you’ve written.

According to the brothers, “We automatically thought of Hemingway, his short, declarative sentences. If you just cut out long words, wordy constructions, it makes the article much more powerful.”

Although the platform isn’t perfect, flagging pointless adverbs and confusing sentences will at least start helping people who don’t have strong written communication skills write better content.

Even for people who do a lot of writing, it’s still a great reminder tool. For fun I pasted in a random TechTips article and found all the edits quite helpful. I used the passive voice a few times, each of which could have been flipped to the active if I’d taken the time. It highlighted three adverbs, all of which could have been nixed. And it highlighted some complex sentences that could have been made clearer. Great edits.

Hemingway App is currently only web-based and free to use. It appears they are thinking of selling a desktop program once they get more feedback on whether it would be a popular alternative.

How would you use this in your business? Let me know.