For a few years now I’ve been using a free text editor called Grammarly, which I like very much. But now I also use another one that is useful in different ways.
Grammarly is great because it picks up on misused words and misspelled words and bad punctuation.
But now I’ve also started to use another free text editor that is just as useful as Grammarly but in different ways.
This text editor is called Hemingway, and the way it works is you copy and paste your writing into it, and it highlights what it thinks is passive voice as well as unnecessary adverbs and clunky, hard-to-read sentences. It can also word count and well as counting letters, characters, sentences, and paragraphs.
It’s brilliant at picking out passive voice which is always better to change to active voice, as in changing “he started running” to “he ran.”
The ability for it to pick up on hard-to-read sentences is also extremely useful.
But the only downside to it is that it not only tells you to get rid of unnecessary adverbs, but all adverbs. Yep, it seems that the Hemingway text editor doesn’t like adverbs at all.
For example, if you write, “blared loudly” it will tell you to remove the adverb “loudly.”
But if you write, “said jokingly” it will tell you to get rid of “jokingly” which is something you’d probably want to keep. Ironically, when I ran this article through Hemingway, it highlighted the words jokingly and loudly and said to omit them.
I could also say that another downside is that it may think some of your sentences have too many complex phrases or long sentences, but that all depends on what grade of readability your audience has. If you’re writing to someone who has a good understanding of the complex issue you're discussing, then there is nothing wrong with using long sentences, etc.
But you can use your judgment of your own work. Either way, the Hemingway text editor is great for picking up on errors you might not see in your own writing and it costs nothing to use.
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