Hemingway Snip

App Swap: Hemmingway Text Editor

Ensuring written text is clear, engaging and accessible is important when creating resources. To achieve this when new to writing online can be difficult. Luckily there are several tools out there to help you! Spelling and grammar checks in Word and PowerPoint are a great example. 

In this post we’d like to feature one free online tool that helps you develop your writing style. The Hemmingway app is a website that allows you to check how accessible your text is to the reader. Here’s how they describe their service: 

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. It’s like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose.
It highlights sections of text that are “hard to read” and prompts you to consider alterations. It’ll also check for passive text and over use of adverbs. Many of these practices are very relevant for producing inclusive materials.
So how does it work? You input your text and it highlights key areas for consideration. To show that, here is the original draft of this post when run through the checker…

Hemingway Snip

As you can see there is work for me to do in improving my style! I would like to say I wrote the draft this way to show how the app works however, dear reader, I feel this may be a fib. So instead I used the app to redraft the post and with just some small tweaks really tightened up what I was trying to convey.

Another fantastic use of the tool that was flagged up by Dr Jane Wray on Twitter was in writing a lay summary for article posts!

About the author

Mike Ewen

I'm a Learning and Teaching Enhancement Adviser within LTE. I am particularly interested in exploring new technologies and enjoy nothing more than a good rummage in a settings folder.

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