A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
foxtype.comIn theory this is a great idea, but not a single implementation I've seen fits my needs.
I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that.
More crippling than that, these editors don't support anything besides the writing simplification features. HTML breaks it, markdown breaks it, and it can't do WYSIWYG (Hemingway does this last, but not well).
I don't mean to criticize the tools too harshly: linguistic processing of any kind is hard and they do a good job at that. I can certainly see how this would be useful for someone who writes more seriously than I do and can take the time to write first and mark up or format in a different editor later. And the effort to make it something I would use is large. I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown, and a vim plugin. :)
But for me, not having integration with my workflow makes it too complicated to use and the value it provides isn't large enough for me to change my workflow.
Hemingway is actually pretty simple, I'm writing a library which implements something similar. "Grammarly" exists, but I think the suggestions are silly. This Foxtype editor is fancy, but Hemingway produces better results in practice.
What programming language would a library for this have to be in for it to be especially useful? I'm doing it in JavaScript for now, since I can think of immediate cases where I can embed it. Elisp will come immediately after that, since I compose my emails in Emacs most of the time. Next on the docket might be a C version, with the intent that you could add it to GTK+ apps.
> What programming language would a library for this have to be in for it to be especially useful? I'm doing it in JavaScript for now, since I can think of immediate cases where I can embed it.
I think JavaScript is a pretty good start as that can be made into a browser plugin and a command line tool relatively simply.
For offline writing (e.g. emacs/vim), I've found textlint[1] to work really nicely, and fits well into a LaTeX+Makefile workflow.
Do any of this type of tool have an offline version or plugin that would work on Mac? I'd love to use one, but I can't use a web app for confidential information. I'd be happy to install a bundle in vim, Sublime Text, emacs, or whatever.
I use https://github.com/amperser/proselint with emacs fly check support + e-prime mode.
Ah, cool, thanks!
> I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown
I was going to recommend Grammarly, it has a Chrome extension, but I think it doesn't support markdown. I use it and I'm happy with it. They have an advanced subscription for 'advanced' linguistic checking and furthermore, the gold service is hiring a human proof-reader. It's interesting.
I’m an admirer of the writing of George Orwell so I thought it would be fitting to paste the first two paragraphs of his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”.
It suggested removing a number of modifier phrases. These phrases were not redundant and removing them would result in loss of important detail, information and/or emphasis. In some cases removing those words would result in nonsensical or syntactically incorrect sentences. Further experimentation showed that it complained about “mostly” and “many” as modifiers but not “some”.
It highlighted a number of long noun phrases but none of these could be suitably shortened, and Orwell’s uses of the passive voice were mostly appropriate; re-phrasing these to be in the active voice would result in awkward prose. Its left branching sentences were not rambling at all.
On the plus side, I thought its highlighting of long sentences worked well but not all long sentences are difficult to parse and a succession of multiple short sentences can have an unnatural rhythm. It also failed to take into account that colons and semi-colons can be used to separate main clauses.
I wouldn’t use it myself, but I can see how it could be a useful tool for considering how a sentence can be rephrased and encouraging awareness of the issues it highlights.
This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416
Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
The app is correct, both of those phrases are passive.
Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition.
Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject. Both those phrases also meet that condition. Rearrange them and you'l see:
[1] "I was exhuasted" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not seem passive because you've elided the subject, which is part of the problem of the passive voice, it lacks clarity
[2] "Our work here is done" --> "We completed our work" Like the first phrase, this phrase elides the subject of this sentence, the individuals doing the work. In this case, including the subject ("We") may feel repetitive because of the pronoun "our", but its still more precise.
Also, passive voice isn't bad, however it most often lacks clarity. Sometimes that's okay, and sometimes you want some flexibility with your sentences for effect, such as ending a sentence with the subject (one of the primary reasons to use the passive voice).
> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me"
I don't think that a correct analysis of the sentence. The exhausted is an adjective, similar to I am tired, but saying "Something tired me" would have a totally different meaning, because it's a different, unrelated sentence. ("I am covered in green paint." also doesn't seem like it's passive voice, but maybe I'm wrong.) As far as I can tell, "our work here is done" is indeed passive voice, but it is also perfectly fine English, and thus must not be highlighted.
"I was exhausted" absolutely does not "lack clarity". What could it possibly be unclear about?
Looking at http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf, I'm also suspicious of your definition of passive (p.7):
> ...passives do not always contain be and do not always contain a past participle. They also do not always obscure the role or responsibility of the doer. They may or may not have a subject (the passive clause in any monument defaced by vandals does not), and they may or may not have a by-phrase (The president has been assassinated does not). Sometimes they specify the agent of an action very clearly (as in It was thrown at them by hooligans), and sometimes not (as in It was thrown at them); sometimes they specify the undergoer (as in A surfer was attacked by a shark) and sometimes not (as in Being attacked by a shark is no fun). Often (as in (3)) there is no action whatsoever, rendering the strange phrase “receives the action” inappropriate.
For those who won't read the whole thing, here's the relevant part regarding sentences like "I was exhausted":
> The term ‘adjectival passive’ is often applied (perhaps not very felicitously) to active clauses with predicative adjective phrases in which the adjective derives from the past participle of a verb and has a passive-like meaning. There is frequently an ambiguity between be passives and adjectival ones. For example, The door was locked is ambiguous: as a be passive it says that at a particular time someone took the action of locking the door, and as an adjectival passive it says that during some past time period the door was in its locked state. Since the complement in this kind of clause is an adjective phrase, verbs other than be can be used (The door seemed locked, as far as I could tell), and so can adjectives derived with the negative prefix un- (The island was uninhabited by humans).
Thanks for the article, I'll give it a read later today.
I'll try to add some clarity to what I said (because passive voice isn't the only way to muddy the linguistic waters).
A passive voice doesn't make the sentence bad and often the passive voice does constitute perfectly fine English. When saying, "I was exhuasted" I may have no idea what drained me of my energy, in which case a passive is totally appropriate. However, it does lack clarity for the very reason you suggest "${SUBJECT} exhausted me" changes the meaning--"I was exhausted" doesn't specify who or what is responsible for the action of the verb. By not mentioning what exhausted you, the sentence looses a small amount of specificity.
"I am covered in green paint" is also passive because what covered you in paint? Something or someone is doing the paint covering, but by using the passive voice you can obscure the subject.
While we are recommending articles, Orwell has some enjoyable things to say about the use of the passive language in politics.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Writing in such a way so that you can be understood isn't sufficient. You should always write in such a way so that you cannot be misunderstood, and using the active voice with its higher specificity goes along way towards that. However, exceptions will abound. As one of my professors used to say, "Language is the result habits--all of them bad".
Replacing 'done' with a different adjective in the second sentence makes it clear that that sentence is also not passive. E.g.
"Our work is difficult."
> Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject.
This is not correct. It happens to be true if the verb is transitive and denotes a physical action, but that is accidental. The passive is defined in syntactic terms (including the past participle you mention), not in semantic terms.
In "I was exhausted", it seems to me that the word "exhausted" is an adjective, and it's a simple past tense statement not different than saying, "I was sad."
> Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition.
Grammatically, the passive voice also places the active participant as an explicit indirect object rather than the subject. A sentence without an explicit indirect object is not in the passive voice.
It may still have some of the same problems of communication which motivate people to work to avoid the use of the passive voice, and may even go further than the actual passive voice in those problems in that rather than deemphasizing the actual actor -- as happens when that moves from subject to object -- it omits the active party entirely. But its still not in the passive voice, despite the similarity in issues that arise.
> Grammatically, the passive voice also places the active participant as an explicit indirect object rather than the subject. A sentence without an explicit indirect object is not in the passive voice.
This is not true. Something as simple as "I was sat on" illustrates this well—in English, the subject is still required but the actor is not. This is much MORE so for eg Latin, where verbs take voices with much less context.
"I was exhausted" is ambiguous, using either the imperfect passive voice or the imperfect "to be" with a past participle. However, it's perfectly valid to note as passive as it is, in fact, passive under one of the two interpretations.
Passive voice is merely a form of speech. It’s not blanket-wrong. It serves to diminish the actor, which can be a legitimate choice.
“He was diagnosed with flu” is passive voice, and appropriate, because the diagnoser is not important. We care more about the flu than the doctor.
“Mistakes were made” is evasive and serves to obscure, and should be avoided.
It also manages clean transitions when introducing new actors. The passive voice allows you to put the known at the beginning of a sentence and the new information nearer the end. Without the passive, each individual sentence may be objectively more felicitous, but there is a cognitive disconnection between them.
It might even be worth pointing out that the "authoritative basis" for all of this passive prohibition is an unfortunate misreading of Strunk & White. The Elements of Style merely points out some cringeworthy ways to misuse the passive, and suggests that it shouldn't be your go-to voice.
Oh, The Elements of Style even gets lot of stuff wrong. Their examples of `passive voice' aren't even all passive.
It could also be the case that "mistakes were made" is poor, but without it having anything to do with it being in passive voice. Passive voice also doesn't necessarily "diminish the actor", consider "She was diagnosed by the doctors at X, and the diagnosis was later overturned by a senior doctor.". That's a kind of a blanket claim about passive that's just bound to be wrong when you check it on actual English sentences (I think Pullum's paper I linked to in another comment addresses this well).
I think of it like a code linter; I won't follow every suggestion, but it's nice having another set of "eyes" to point out mistakes.
You sure that's not passive? Exhausted: drained, used up. By what? Sounds passive to me.
Your question, by what, shows why it's not passive. In this case, "exhausted" is an adjective, and thus the sentence is not passive voice. The subject (I) is not receiving the action of getting used up or drained, it is doing the action of being in a drained, used up state. Now, if the sentence was something else like "I was exhausted by his tiresome ramblings," then yes, that would be passive voice.
"Four score and seven years ago..."
http://i.imgur.com/K0Mhkse.png
[I'm not snarking, by the way. Just playing with it. It's perfectly okay to have a tool optimized for, say, business correspondence.]
I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
> I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
Every 4 or 5 years everyone celebrates terse writing like it's new.
FTFY.
Writers periodically resurrect brevity.
Concise is better than brief.
Write right.
I feel like every 4 or 5 comments, someone comments as if they have some new insight ;)
Seriously though, this is a pretty useful tool, especially for people who are new at writing.
I have seen almost this exact same thing like a decade ago.
No, people celebrate terse writing fairly non-stop. It may only intersect with your awareness every 4-5 years, but its not like it goes away in between.
Those writers who don't appreciate terse writing are too busy writing to celebrate.
I don't think this is presenting terse writing as a new insight. The innovation here is (if I'm understanding it correctly) using a grammar parser to identify some fairly complex criteria (e.g. avoiding left-branching sentences).
When you become older, everything fits this pattern, which makes day to day living tiresome.
There are trends in writing like in everything else, I guess.
I say it is interesting. It's from the same guys from 'Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences'. AFAIK, here they are implementing automatic summarization, aided presumably by the accuracy of their parser. I signed up and I look forward to trying it.
The variable pricing is pretty interesting. In one session I got $1, $3 and $5, while another gave $5, $12, and $20. $5 felt like a good deal considering what I pay annually for Grammarly. I'd be curious what their average is.
Most writing needs pruning. Not mine. Thanks. :P
Reminds me of this: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074243
Is there no beauty in painting vivid pictures through colourful expression?
Sure, being terse makes consumption faster and easier, but don't you trade
that for the tool of directing the reader's imagination?
I guess the skill is in being terse yet still descriptive?
The examples in this tool can be misleading, especially if you haven't read the classics like _The Elements of Style_ and _On Writing Well_. Ridding your writing of fluff is central to their teaching, but not at the expense of detail.
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
--- William Strunk Jr., _The Elements of Style_
Instead of quoting them at length, I will let you read them when you have time. The Elements of Style is less than 100 pages, and most of On Writing Well is tied up in the first four chapters.
Be very careful with the Elements of Style. Not everyone shares their prescriptions (and their descriptions are mostly wrong).
Thank you! I was not aware of their existence.
http://draftin.com has something like this as well
Testing this by using it to write a blog post. So far so good. It's pretty nifty for "pruning" dense writing.