How You Can Improve Your Writing with Hemingway Editor

Writing is easy, good writing is hard.

Let’s take a step back.

You must have heard from those internet gurus or social media experts. Blogging is easy and a quick way to earn passive income. All you have to do is write content.

Well…

It’s easy to start a blog now. There are so many tutorials on how you can start your own blog on different hosting. Siteground. Bluehost. Google Cloud.

What about writing? How easy is it?

Any experience writers would advise you to keep on writing daily.

I do find writing continuously does improve writing speed. But what about writing quality?

Hardly any better, I must admit.

How to improve your writing skills?

Good thing I came across Hemingway Editor app, a free online writing editor created in 2013 by Adam and Ben Long to make your writing bold and clear.

What is Hemingway Editor app?

Before we start with how Hemingway App can improve a piece of writing, it’s good to know what is Hemingway Editor app.

At its core, it’s a simple word processor that identifies 5 major writing problems that affect your readability. It highlights sentences with possible issues in different colors and offers suggested changes.

Hemingway Editor will flag these 5 major problems in writing and highlight it in different colors:

• Hard to read sentences (yellow)
• Very hard to read sentences (pink)
• Complex words or phrases (purple)
• Adverbs (blue)
• Passive voice (green)

It also gives you some quick counts on the number of paragraphs, sentences, words, and characters.

The first thing you’ll notice is the readability of your writing measured by grade level. It builds on the innovations of researchers of a field called “Readability”. Readability refers to how easy it is to understand a given text.

Writing for readability often means writing at a lower grade. In fact, Ernest Hemingway’s work scores as low as 5th grade, despite his adult audience.

So how does Hemingway Editor app help me write better?

Let’s dive right in.

Improve Your Writing with Hemingway Editor

Keep Your Sentence Short

When I started writing, I have a habit of writing long sentences. The long sentence makes your writing harder to read.

The average length of a good sentence is 10 – 20 words. Hemingway makes it easy to identify long sentences.

Hemingway keeps you on your toe as I write. As your sentence getting longer, Hemingway will highlight it in yellow or red color. You need to re-structure my sentence and cut unnecessary words.

The keys to writing a short sentence are to keep one idea per sentence, to use fewer words and expressions. The shorter and simpler the sentence, the easier it is to read.

You should keep in mind, too many short sentences make your writing choppy. A good content consists of sentences with a variety of lengths from a short sentence to medium sentence to long sentence.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Improve your writing with #Hemingway.” quote=”Long sentence makes your writing harder to understand.”]

Avoid Passive Voice

Another writing habit that I have is how often I use passive voice in most of my sentences. Generally, we should try to use the active voice whenever possible. Passive voice sentences often use more words and can be vague.

Let’s look at some examples:
Active voice: John fixed the car
Passive voice: The car was fixed by John

In active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action. On the example above, John is the subject and he is doing the action.

In passive voice, the target of the action gets promoted to the subject position. On the example above, the subject of the sentence becomes the car but the car isn’t doing anything. Rather, the car is just the recipient of John’s action. The focus of the sentence has changed from John to the car.

Active voice is simpler and more direct and best to make your point. Active voice puts you in the driving seat and makes your content more engaging for the reader.

Hemingway Editor highlights any use of passive voice in green. Convert the sentence to active voice to make it stronger.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Improve your writing with #Hemingway.” quote=”Passive voice isn’t wrong, but it’s often a poor way to present your thoughts.”]

Use Simple Word

Have you ever stopped reading an article because there are too many words you couldn’t understand?

I do…

One of the most effective ways of improving readability is to use short and common words or simple words. Simple words make your writing easy to understand. Readers like to read content that is written in a simple language and easy to understand.

Hemingway Editor will highlight any complex word in purple color and provide suggestions that you can use.

When you choose a word, use words that your audience will understand. Ultimately, you are writing for your audience.

Remove Redundant Adverbs

An adverb is a word that modifies another word. Ernest Hemingway avoided using adverbs. Why?

Often times, adverbs weaken the verbs and largely redundant. Hemingway helps to identify adverbs. Instead of using a verb with an adverb, you could either omit the word or find a stronger verb.

For instance, instead of saying someone is “walking slowly”, I could have said that they “tip-toed” or they “crept”. It makes my writing more vivid.

The key is to remove redundant and unnecessary words. If the meaning of a sentence doesn’t change when you delete an adverb, remove it. This will make your writing more forceful.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Improve your writing with #Hemingway.” quote=”Remove adverbs and use a stronger expression.”]

Final Thoughts

Hemingway Editor is a handy tool that you can use to improve your writing. You can use the online editor version which is free. If you would like to use it online, you could download the desktop app version at $19.90.

Use Hemingway Editor as a measurement for better writing. But you should blindly follow all its suggestion. While it’s good to keep your sentence short for example, sometimes you might want to vary your sentence length to change the pace of your writing and make your writing more engaging.

While Hemingway Editor helps you to improve your writing by highlighting several writing issues, no good writing is possible without reading.