What are some tools to help me simplify my English writing?
January 10, 2023 11:37 AM Subscribe
What are some tools to help me simplify my English writing?
I tend to write overly complicated sentences with overwrought vocabulary and I also havea bad habit of excessively ornate sentence structure. I need an editing tool to simplify my language to make it more readable. Something that highlights sentences that could use simplification. I don't care so much about the form of the tool but a web page where I can paste in a writing sample is fine.
The Hemingway Editor App is pretty much exactly what I am looking for and I've used it successfully. I like how clear the UI is in explaining what could be improved. But I'm a little suspicious of it, it's the only tool like that I've ever used. I gave Grammarly a quick try but the free level doesn't do much for simplicity or readability (anyone use premium?) Simplish is an interesting tool but its commitment to translating to formal Basic English yields text that's nearly unreadable for colloquial English speakers.
I tend to write overly complicated sentences with overwrought vocabulary and I also havea bad habit of excessively ornate sentence structure. I need an editing tool to simplify my language to make it more readable. Something that highlights sentences that could use simplification. I don't care so much about the form of the tool but a web page where I can paste in a writing sample is fine.
The Hemingway Editor App is pretty much exactly what I am looking for and I've used it successfully. I like how clear the UI is in explaining what could be improved. But I'm a little suspicious of it, it's the only tool like that I've ever used. I gave Grammarly a quick try but the free level doesn't do much for simplicity or readability (anyone use premium?) Simplish is an interesting tool but its commitment to translating to formal Basic English yields text that's nearly unreadable for colloquial English speakers.
Not an app, but I find this useful.
It only works if you can speak or read another language.
If you suspect a sentence is overly complex, try translating it into another language. If this is difficult to do, you might find that the terms or concepts you are using in the original sentence lack clarity.
I teach using sign language and spend a great deal of time translating from English texts. Often I wonder if the English writer really knows what they mean. As result I've become a huge fan of simple English.
posted by BrStekker at 12:20 PM on January 10, 2023
It only works if you can speak or read another language.
If you suspect a sentence is overly complex, try translating it into another language. If this is difficult to do, you might find that the terms or concepts you are using in the original sentence lack clarity.
I teach using sign language and spend a great deal of time translating from English texts. Often I wonder if the English writer really knows what they mean. As result I've become a huge fan of simple English.
posted by BrStekker at 12:20 PM on January 10, 2023
The Globish Scanner will help identify fancy words which may not be as universally known as we believe.
One thing Native English Me internalized in grad school was my boss advising against "run-on sentences". You don't need an app to aim for a baseline of one concept = one sentence. Conditional clauses etc. have their place but if a sentence is more than about 12 words long, readers may have forgotten the start before they get to the end. Thinking about it; if you chunk a sentence into phrases "One thing" + "I internalized" + "in grad school" 12 words is probably close to 7 chunks which is the short-term memory limit for most people.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:41 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
One thing Native English Me internalized in grad school was my boss advising against "run-on sentences". You don't need an app to aim for a baseline of one concept = one sentence. Conditional clauses etc. have their place but if a sentence is more than about 12 words long, readers may have forgotten the start before they get to the end. Thinking about it; if you chunk a sentence into phrases "One thing" + "I internalized" + "in grad school" 12 words is probably close to 7 chunks which is the short-term memory limit for most people.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:41 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Seconding Hemingway. What do you mean by being "suspicious" of it? I like it better than Grammarly.
posted by pinochiette at 12:42 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by pinochiette at 12:42 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
At the risk of stating you've answered your own question - I'll third the suggestion (plus fourth, if OP is included) for Hemingway.
I know of at least two semi-famous engineering industry leaders that regularly use it to simplify their own writing. I'm not entirely sure what there is to be skeptical of.
(I use it too, but I am not notable in any way)
posted by saeculorum at 1:01 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
I know of at least two semi-famous engineering industry leaders that regularly use it to simplify their own writing. I'm not entirely sure what there is to be skeptical of.
(I use it too, but I am not notable in any way)
posted by saeculorum at 1:01 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for all replies. Hemingway is very helpful! I don't mean to sound critical of it, it's the best thing I've found for this purpose so far.
My suspicion comes from it looking like a one-off hack by two brothers who seemingly have no other background in linguistics or writing tools. It's from 2013 with the last update 5 years ago. Also the web implementation runs entirely in the browser in Javascript. Which is awesome but suggests the processing is fairly limited. Really what I'm wondering is if there are other algorithmic tools that do something similar to Hemingway but maybe with different heuristics or language processing.
One particular avenue: I have a feeling that the new language models like GPT-3 are about to blow this space open. But I haven't seen any deep learning applications for improving my own text. I also think hand crafted heuristic approaches could do a lot here. Thanks for the suggestions about Grammarly, Readable, and Globish Scanner.
posted by Nelson at 1:51 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
My suspicion comes from it looking like a one-off hack by two brothers who seemingly have no other background in linguistics or writing tools. It's from 2013 with the last update 5 years ago. Also the web implementation runs entirely in the browser in Javascript. Which is awesome but suggests the processing is fairly limited. Really what I'm wondering is if there are other algorithmic tools that do something similar to Hemingway but maybe with different heuristics or language processing.
One particular avenue: I have a feeling that the new language models like GPT-3 are about to blow this space open. But I haven't seen any deep learning applications for improving my own text. I also think hand crafted heuristic approaches could do a lot here. Thanks for the suggestions about Grammarly, Readable, and Globish Scanner.
posted by Nelson at 1:51 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
This is technically about health communication, but I’m a wordy writer and the CDC’s plain language guidelines are really helpful.
posted by centrifugal at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by centrifugal at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
This page has links to a number of different readability-scoring checkers, plus a consensus checker. None of these are interactive—you'd need to feed some written text in once it's done to get a score.
The Hemingway guys don't say what algorithm they're using, but these algorithms are well established (you can find hundreds of implementations on Github), and I would be surprised if they weren't using one off the rack. Maybe there's some way-new machine-learning checker. Maybe you could ask ChatGPT to critique your writing.
posted by adamrice at 2:30 PM on January 10, 2023
The Hemingway guys don't say what algorithm they're using, but these algorithms are well established (you can find hundreds of implementations on Github), and I would be surprised if they weren't using one off the rack. Maybe there's some way-new machine-learning checker. Maybe you could ask ChatGPT to critique your writing.
posted by adamrice at 2:30 PM on January 10, 2023
In my profession we can't go pasting our work into public web apps because we don't know where the text goes. The solution is good old MS Word, which now has some features around "conciseness" on the Review>Proofing>Editor tool.
This is in addition to the old classic "average words per sentence" and "characters per word" scores which go into the readability metrics Word has been displaying for over a decade.
posted by Narrow Harbor at 7:51 PM on January 10, 2023
This is in addition to the old classic "average words per sentence" and "characters per word" scores which go into the readability metrics Word has been displaying for over a decade.
posted by Narrow Harbor at 7:51 PM on January 10, 2023
Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I marked Readable and Grammarly as best answers because they were closest to what I was asking for. I don't like either as much as Hemingway, at least the free preview, but they are both good. I suspect Grammarly has a lot to offer if you pay.
Mostly this discussion was really helpful for me understanding the state of the art. I ended up writing a blog post detailing some of what I learned. It's a lot simpler than I was imagining.
I skimmed the minified code for Hemingway App. Unless I missed something it's remarkably basic. For instance its detection of adverbs and passive voice boils down to looking for simple text patterns, there's literally a list of like 200 adverbs that it searches for. I'd naively assumed it was doing some complex part of speech stuff. I think all of Hemingway is just some basic text heuristics, like adamrice says. What distinguishes it is that it chooses just a few heuristics and they are unusual ones that emphasize short writing. Also the Hemingway UI is quite good, particularly in the context of its release in 2014.
I also gave ChatGPT a whirl and got somewhere with the prompt “please tell me which sentences in the following essay are too complicated and why. what is wrong with my writing?” It gave me back explanations like
posted by Nelson at 7:20 AM on January 11, 2023
Mostly this discussion was really helpful for me understanding the state of the art. I ended up writing a blog post detailing some of what I learned. It's a lot simpler than I was imagining.
I skimmed the minified code for Hemingway App. Unless I missed something it's remarkably basic. For instance its detection of adverbs and passive voice boils down to looking for simple text patterns, there's literally a list of like 200 adverbs that it searches for. I'd naively assumed it was doing some complex part of speech stuff. I think all of Hemingway is just some basic text heuristics, like adamrice says. What distinguishes it is that it chooses just a few heuristics and they are unusual ones that emphasize short writing. Also the Hemingway UI is quite good, particularly in the context of its release in 2014.
I also gave ChatGPT a whirl and got somewhere with the prompt “please tell me which sentences in the following essay are too complicated and why. what is wrong with my writing?” It gave me back explanations like
“Also its UI is a little more understandable.” The use of “also” and “a little” could be more clearly defined.I think with a custom UI designed around an editing tool GPT-3 could be a very powerful tool for helping people improve their writing.
posted by Nelson at 7:20 AM on January 11, 2023
Seconding the readability formulas website. I spent a couple years developing more readable writing. My process was basically writing, testing readability, and then rewriting until it hit my target. I quickly came to see that much of my writing was needlessly complicated. Now, when I am writing for students or a general audience, I usually write to 8th grade accessibility or better without trying to.
posted by snofoam at 8:55 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by snofoam at 8:55 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
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Nearly all of my work is in Libreoffice, so I need to use the cut-and-paste-to-the-website method for getting feedback. Other than adding a couple of extra steps, it's painless. You can also tune its edits and proofreading according to the type of writing and intended audience, which is nice. There's also a browser plugin that can proof/edit in form boxes like this one.
posted by jquinby at 12:01 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]