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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

You know what's fun? Pasting in text from Ernest Hemingway and seeing what he did wrong.

But seriously, this is a nice, simple way to point out some general rules of thumb for improving writing, although I would love for it to be less proscriptive. Not every long sentence is a bad sentence, not every passive-voice sentence is a bad sentence, and not every adverb is a bad adverb.

Oh, and by the way, the copy editor in me can't help but notice that an app that's intended to help you improve your writing tells you to "Aim for 2 or less" adverbs, rather than "Aim for 2 or fewer."

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The thing about pedantic snark (less/fewer), is that it loses its teeth when you're wrong.

Even if you go in for prescriptive grammar, less and fewer were never strictly divided. The distinction actually came to us through one Mr. Baker's expressed preference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less#Historical_usage

OK, so on the one hand, Alfred the Great used less with counting nouns in 888 AD.

But can we really trust this guy for historical precedent? He burnt the cakes!

> He burnt the cakes!

Maybe he was gluten intolerant.

This, and singular they[1], make me very happy indeed - all the people who "correct" my grammar are actually, themselves, wrong (or, at most, people waving an opinion in my face as if it were a fact.) <3

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

There are a lot of prescriptive "rules" in English that aren't really rules. Ending sentences in prepositions is probably my favorite.

"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." --Churchill (maybe)

Some discussion:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001702.h...

There appeared a wonderful article on just this topic on the Inky Fool website a few days ago: http://blog.inkyfool.com/2014/02/less-fewers.html

While I don't think the proposed edit would help, the commenter isn't actually wrong - in modern usage, it is more correct to say "fewer corrections" than "less corrections." Language doesn't form in a vacuum, nor is its growth confined to dictionaries. Rather, language is a living, breathing thing and grammar is closer to history than mechanics.

Consider the less v. fewer debate. Yes, several hundred years ago, it was just fine to say "less corrections." However, for whatever reason, the upper crust decided that "fewer corrections" both looked and sounded better. Consequently, "less corrections" evolved to be less correct. My inner smartass wanted to say "fewer correct", but that would be a silly joke.

It's like Russian. If you speak French, you can understand many Russian words. This isn't because French and Russian are linguistic cousins. Rather, it's because French was the language of nobility and words trickled down.

Or heck, we could talk about the word "you." You was originally formal, whereas "thou" was more relaxed and informal. Yet, today, if I started a comment on Hacker News with, "I fear thou are wrong", it would seem needlessly formal.

To conclude this long mess (it was supposed to be four lines and turned into paragraphs), language evolves constantly. Though certain distinctions didn't exist in earlier English, they exist now. However, if you know much about the history and formation of English, you should be less pedantic. It should also make us much more tolerant of people for whom English isn't their native language. We speak an intensely complex language with random rules that apply in some cases and not others.

Thank heavens we don't have to compile our language before we speak it...:)

The 'language is evolving' and 'language is defined by usage' arguments go both ways.

When something was both not historically incorrect, and not considered incorrect by many current people, the arguments people make about it being wrong starts to crumble slightly.

It's kind of like A/B testing. A blue button isn't wrong, but a green button coverts better.

Language is the same. If your goal is to communicate, the most easily understood choice is best. Some grammatical quirks do nothing to hinder comprehension and don't need to be pointed out (ie - less/fewer). Others are far more toxic.

However, grammatical quirks which don't hinder comprehension still act as signals of status. Using "less" where "fewer" is more correct, or vice versa, will definitely hinder acceptnce of the message by many, regardless of its comprehensibility.

"more correct" is nonsense, since 'correct' is not a gradable adjective. "more acceptable" would be correct.

Whether "less [count-noun]" is acceptable depends on granularity: "less than two adverbs" is acceptable whenever it feels alright to you to just abstract adverbs into a pure number. "less than two corrections" is not acceptable to most people because corrections don't lend themselves to being abstracted into a number.

Languages are not random. It's just that prescriptivist get hung up on random subsets of language and pretend they've seen all of it.

Sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say.

If you're specifically talking about my use of "more correct", let me try another example of why I think "more correct" is useful nonsense. I'm Canadian. Therefore, I use spellings like "colour" and "honour".

However, if I'm writing something primarily targeted to Americans, I switch to honor and color. It isn't that colour becomes incorrect when I write for an American audience. To me, color is always wrong. But, if I want to influence an American audience, color will be the correct spelling they're looking for.

When I'm obsessing over edits, especially when underlying rules are unclear (or non-existent), shades of correctness are the best metric I can find. Do you have another?

Something is either correct or it isn't, is the point.

You might instead write "closer to correct", but, how clunky.

> Something is either correct or it isn't

If you are building truth tables, then something is either correct or it isn't. But that's certainly not the case when using words to communicate ideas between humans.

After all, haven't each of us taken a multiple choice test with instructions to choose the most correct answer?

When it comes to diction, there are always a variety of choices. You make those decisions based on whichever word or phrase works best given the circumstances.

It's no different than choosing the most appropriate programming language for a given project; plenty will work, but ultimately one is the most logical given who will be writing it, reading it, using it, maintaining it, deploying it, etc.

I could say the same about acceptability. You either accept something or don't. Grudging acceptance is still acceptance, right?

Meanwhile, you can assign a mathematical measure of partial correctness for, say, sets of statements, simply as the fraction of correct statements over the total. In linguistics, you can assign measures to both acceptibility and correctness simultaneously by taking the fraction of people who "accept" a construct as "correct".

I'm not even sure how many levels of meta I'm at, so I'm done.

Guys -- use whatever the fuck you'd like.

> Something is either correct or it isn't, is the point.

    Correct \Cor*rect"\ (k[^o]r*r[e^]kt"), a.
    [L. correctus, p. p. of corrigere to make straight,
    to correct; cor- + regere to lead straight: cf. F.
    correct. See {Regular}, {Right}, and cf. {Escort}.]

    Set right, or made straight; hence, conformable to
    truth, rectitude, or propriety, or to a just standard;
    not faulty or imperfect; free from error; as, correct
    behavior; correct views.
     [1913 Webster]
  
           Always use the most correct editions.    
           --Felton.

Granted, 1913 webster is almost an archaic resource at this point, but it's interesting that its very first example of use is "most correct".

Except in any domain where correctness is not black and white.

Einstein's theories about the universe are more correct than Newton's. Neither are "correct".

Reminds me of an old quote by George E. P. Box - "All models are wrong, but some are useful"

Coming from a Canadian, perhaps the most correct response would be to chide us on our pursuit of a more perfect union :-)

'correct' is definitely gradable and is commonly used as such. There is a nice long history of such usage going back at least a quarter of a millennium.

"Which is more correct? This or that?"

There's even "most correct" as in "it is most correct to choose..."

This is due to the simple fact that in many non-trivial fields, correctness is not absolute and thus multiple correct choices or outcomes are valid. Local preferences might recognize this, but prefer one over the other. In noun usage, this is a carryover from verb usage

"My shoes were mostly corrected by the cobbler." is perfectly fine, so users of English also find that "The fit of my shoes is mostly correct." is also perfectly valid usage.

More examples:

Which partial phrase emphasizes, and persuades better a point better (as a matter of rhetoric)?

"It is most correct to take this option."

"It is a preference to take this option."

Of course the former is stronger than the latter.

"correct" clearly grades.

Maybe "more perfect"?

Generally the less syllables the better...

Brevity is a sickness. I have natural immunity...;)

Thanks! copy... paste...

And the results are in: http://i.imgur.com/6KMvhIa.png

(It appears that this comment itself is only good enough when I include this sentence.)

Funny enough, try making that argument to a Russian. The argument that language is more history than science, and is fluid and ever-changing. Many words in Russian are commonly, and in most cases properly, pronounced one way, and yet spelled another. It's infuriating. Of course, what do I know, I have the privilege of having no native language. Borne in Ukraine, first spoke Russian, with Ukrainian accent, then learned Ukrainian, with a Russian accent, and now my primary language is English, with eastern european accent :)

Oh my god that sounds like me. Grew up speaking some Cantonese with parents in America, learned to speak English fluently with a Chinese accent, went to China and learned to speak a bit of Mandarin with a Cantonese/English accent, back in the U.S. and somehow along the way I've acquired an accent in Cantonese as well!

The thing about the pedantic anti snark is, it doesn't matter if you can show that the 'incorrect' usage goes back to the 17th Century, if the bulk of the educated audience you are writing for thinks that it is incorrect. You might as well use the 'correct' usage.

You should write for your audience. The only thing that's correct or incorrect is if you succeeded in communicating with the intended recipient.

It's worth noting, though, that many readers will be distracted by your use of less with counting nouns. Whether that's a pro or a con is up to you.

irregardless, you knew what he meant, right?

I smell a troll...

I don't really understand why a minority of people continue to belabor this. Anybody who has recently spent time in writing courses in a modern American institution knows that 'fewer' is greatly preferred to 'less' in this context, often to the extent of losing points if the latter is used. Students aren't going to care about your citations if following your advice means they lose points on their papers.

I felt like OP went out of his/her way to avoid snarkiness. He/she made several positive comments, added a helpful suggestion, and only then prefaced a "pedantic" comment by saying "Oh, by the way, a small part of me can't help but notice this..." That's a lot of mitigating language to earn the label "snark."

Stephen Fry has an interesting take on the less/fewer debate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

The thing about pedantic snark (less/fewer), is that it loses its teeth when you're wrong.

The thing about pedantic snark is that, whether it is right or wrong in its details, it almost always comes from a place of hostility and is thus a form of assholery. It indicates the individual "values" good grammar or whatever a helluva lot more than they value respect or politeness.

Ooooh I like that. "pedantic snark"...

I'd love there to be a proliferation of plugins for different writing styles. Hemmingway, Austin, Asimov, Wilde etc. Not so interested in "improving writing", more interested in achieving different aesthetics for different goals.

I agree! The Hemingway mode at seems to be geared (ironically) at technical writing. My English teacher wouldn't like it — it encourages simplification of language and minimization of word variation. Sometimes it's good to write like Austin...

That's what I noticed. It seemed to mark your writing higher the lower the reading grade level it was targeted at.

I didn't realize that writing at a 5th grade level was the pinnacle of writing.

What is with it's fear of adverbs?

Well, Vladimir Nabokov did describe Hemingway as "a writer of books for boys".

Americans are big boys.

Who was Nabokov writing for?

Young girls?

About, not for.

Most amateur writers clutter their writing with unnecessary adverbs. Sometimes, a well placed adverb can add vividness to your writing. But most adverbs we throw around casually can be omitted without consequence.

Great writing rests on the foundation of bold verbs and nouns.

I wouldn't say it is so much about removing adverbs alone as removing the adverb and replacing the verb with one that takes the place of both words.

When you unthinkingly use far too many adverbs in your writing, you clearly reduce an otherwise well-written piece to an increasingly confusing and complex mass of terribly overwrought words.

When you use too many adverbs in your writing, you reduce a well-written piece to a confusing mass of words.

Is your point here that cramming extra adverbs into one's writing just for their own sake is poor style? That's what your example seems to illustrate, and I emphatically agree.

But when adverbs come up naturally in expressing an idea, I'd hate to suggest to anyone that it's a bad thing!

Kind of a funny example, given that you change the meaning from one sentence to another.

Precisely!

Conversely, writing at such a level that only graduate students in your particular field of interest can decipher your meaning must be the pinnacle of writing. As we all know, the purpose of language is to obscure meaning, not to communicate it.

I think I would use it to check marketing text for - say -the front page of a web site where I'm trying to pack as much as possible, as simply as possible into the least number of words.

Which Austin did you mean? Jane [1]?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_G._Austin

Stone Cold, presumably.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Stone-Cold-Truth-WWE/dp/1476751684

More to the point, in a longer work you might want to wander in and out of styles.

Seems like this kind of tool would be better for shorter pieces, say under 3K words or so.

Definitely less than 5k. I tried pasting in Politics of the English Language and it is impossible to use. After a little while the text is double printed (err, lines on top of lines of text).

A neat trick for helping you write in the style of a particular author: use a list of all the words in their collected works as the dictionary in your word processor. Then you'll see any word that e.g. Jane Austin never used as a misspelling, so it's easy to only write using the vocabulary that she used.

Agreed!

It reminds me of advice I commonly get when I started writing: borrow a voice, and grow your own out from that. This is a great way to do that, I think -- it's internalizes the process and makes it a form of muscle memory. That sort of second-nature shit is invaluable to finding yourself. Yum yum yum.

How about Faulkner?

20 of 20 sentences were too easy to read. Try combining all of your sentences into one page-long complex-compound sentence by overusing comma run-ons and semicolons and em-dashes and ellipses and strings of conjunctions.

To offer my own pedantic snark, Austin is the capital of Texas. Austen is the author's name.

>> Aim for 2 or fewer.

This also violates current usage conventions for handling numbers in text.[1] Figures are only meant to be used in greater numbers (a rule of thumb is anything over 30, but I think I read that in a David Foster Wallace text, fwiw) with more complex verbal / textual representations - that is, not "two".

[1] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/593/01/

Yeah the harping on "fewer" vs. "less" and completely ignoring the "2" bothered me too. In my time as a newspaper writer (long ago), the general rule of thumb we used was once you hit 13, switch to numbers. Of course, newspapers have different priorities regarding space, so I could understand if this rule is different for other forms of writing.

I think the "2" is appropriate here. This is not protracted discourse, it's a label. When my sentence lights up some color, and my eyes jump to the sidebar and find that color, we want the max count to pop in a way that it shouldn't in ordinary text.

I recall reading somewhere the phrase "nine or 10". Clearly the writer (or editor) was adhering rather mindlessly to the house rule.

That is neat. I pasted in the first part of Big Two-Hearted River [1] and it scored a little "worse" than the first part of the novel I'm working on, suggesting it's not a perfect metric for how "Hemingway-like" a text is. I've always thought that the cultural meme of Hemingway's terseness is not a very good representation of his actual writing style. In the past when I've been prompted to try parodying Hemmngway [2], the result usually tends to a style that's a little more verbose.

[1] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/hem_river.html

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1t9571/wp_so...

I also fed a chunk my unfinished novel into the Hemingway app, and wrote about the results: http://coreypein.net/blog/2014/02/13/the-hemingway-app-revie...

I really wanted to hate it, but couldn't.

Not to mention that the Chicago Manual of Style recommends spelling out the number "two."

I believe the general rule is that any number which is written with fewer than three words is actually done so.

All the cases listed here: http://writing-style-guide.papercheck.com/~paperch1/index.ph...

It's not like there some magic linguistic genie that they are going to for their analysis. A programmatic engine to determine which long sentence or use of passive-voice are bad or not is not trivial, if even possible with their resources. Just identifying the hopefully few uses of complicated sentences and passive-voice would allow one to quickly sort through them and make a decision on whether the usage was proper or not.

They did a great job, it's a nice app.

Exactly. Strunk and White actually devised their "rules" without the exact analysis of the real texts. Likewise, I can imagine HemingwayApp giving the real Hemingway bad notes.

> You know what's fun? Pasting in text from Ernest Hemingway and seeing what he did wrong.

I was thinking about giving some Joyce a pass through this...

I pasted the text of the Declaration of Independence. Boy was that fun...

9 of 46 sentences are hard to read. 19 of 46 sentences are very hard to read. 12 adverbs. Aim for 11 or less. 8 words or phrases can be simpler. 12 uses of passive voice. Aim for 9 or less.

That's funny, because I tried your comment in Hemingway and it came out with a much better score after I erased every letter of it.

I agree with your second paragraph, although this is following Hemingway's specific rules, so it's good to be strong with them. And of course, you have to know the rules before you can break them.

Aside from Hemingway, it's fun to paste in other classic literature and see what the tool makes of it. It hated Lolita.

You're right. Though we can tell you didn't compose your comment in Hemingway. It characterizes one of your sentences as "hard to read," and another as "very hard to read."

It's so funny. Looks like our brains are evolving towards monkey. Or we should start from our first literature class and let teacher to emphasis on the effective expression skill on top of grammar.

Sometimes I saw very good comments which are very long but informative. It takes us time to compose and read, but that's more valuable than short sentences.

What is a better way for communication?

It should say "aim for two or fewer", since it's better style to spell out any number < 10.

Or "Aim for two or less". It's not a good style to write quantities below ten with digits.

Writing a lot of short sentences develops your sense for when a long one is appropriate.

Your last sentence was "very hard to read"

OK OK I fixed it ;)

It would be nice to be able to dismiss the error highlighting for certain words or phrases. Or better yet, click on the highlight to change it to a less distracting dotted underline. I like knowing what is unclear or indirect, but sometimes I want to break the Hemingway rules by conscious choice.

(And yes, I used the app to make sure to write this with passing marks.)

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