My Tools: Hemingway

The Hemingway app is a great tool for writers; It’s a simple app that helps create tighter, more descriptive understandable text. It is a key part of my 10-Second Design process.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s a screenshot of Hemingway’s splash screen:

And here are screenshots (before and after) of my initial work on the Kraken Blood Weed article I posted up over the weekend:

Before

Note the statistics on the right-hand side of the screenshot:

After

Note how the statistics on the right-hand side of the screenshot have changed:

In the Kraken Blood Weed article above I cut one adverb, six words and made the text easier to read. My readability score went from 10 to 7. (The lower the score the easier the text is to read).

You might not think that’s a big deal—I saved six words in one medium-sized paragraph—but that’s roughly 10% of the word count. Imagine replicating that saving in a large project. You could save hundreds or thousands of unnecessary words which could be put to better use—for your customers’ benefit.

Hemingway isn’t perfect. It’s not as fully-featured as other editing and proofing apps such as Grammarly, but it excels at what it is designed to do.