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.

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?

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.

vs

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!

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.

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

Who was Nabokov writing for?

Young girls?

About, not for.

Americans are big boys.

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

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.

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.

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).

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