The app that teaches you to write like Hemingway

Want to write like Ernest Hemingway? You'll no longer have to fall in love in a European city, join a war in a foreign land or go hunting in Africa. No, instead you can just a use the new Hemingway app.

The Hemingway app, available online and on desktop, promises to make your writing bolder and clearer. It's as simple to use as the sentences it wants you to write. You paste your writing into the app and Hemingway will give it a readability rating. Anything below Grade 10 level is "good" but anything above that judged too difficult. "Hard to read" sentences are highlighted in yellow, "very hard to read" in red, adverbs in blue, complex words in purple and uses of the passive voice in green.

The app has taken off this week after write-ups in the New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, ABC News and Esquire followed its posting on Hacker News.

Naturally, Hemingway has already been tested with Hemingway. Some of his most iconic passages from classics such as The Sun Also Rises and For Whom The Bell Tolls have failed to make the grade.

But I guess that misses the point. Using an app on your writing was never going to be in keeping with romantic spirit of the author who said "there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." No one should expect a computer algorithm to tell you how to write great literature.

As noted by Ian Crouch in his New Yorker piece, the power of Hemingway's prose was not based on slavish adherence to his signature style. In the midst of his short hard sentences, his longer and more descriptive passages grab the reader's attention. It's a balance finely attuned to the rhythm of a reader. So perhaps if you want to write the next great novel you will have to log off your laptop and experience the world after all.

But that's not to say the Hemingway app is without its uses. It's a brilliant tool for cleaning up your work and it does pull out those unnecessary words you used when you got a little ahead of yourself.

It's especially useful for independent bloggers who many not have the luxury of a sub to give their work a second opinion. I've already started using it for my own site, sharpening news articles that don't pack a punch.

Hemingway once said "my aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way." This app helps you do just that.