Is the Hemingway Editor App Good for Novelists?

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    Hemingway Editor app logo over a search bar that reads, "Is it good for novelists?"

    A book editor’s review of Hemingway Editor App

    There are many AI-powered editing platforms out there, and it’s a rare day that I don’t see a post on social media asking about which one is the best to use. And since I work as an editor, you can probably imagine the avalanche of ads for editing tools that I shovel myself out from under on a daily basis. AI is rapidly being integrated into just about every kind of software out there, and if you’re here reading this review, you probably already know how AI is carving out a space in the book publishing arena as well.

    It’s clear that AI is here to stay. What is considerably murkier is how it can be beneficial for writers.

    This post is the first in a series of reviews for our readers that will be taking a close look at some of the top AI editing platforms/software out there. There are plenty of reviews out there comparing price, ease of use, and features. We’ll touch on some of these elements, of course, but what we really wanted to know is how they can serve fiction writers, and especially novelists.

    Check out our review of ProWritingAid here.

    A disclaimer

    Before I dive in, I want to make it clear that I believe human editors are irreplaceable. No AI that we’ll be discussing will be capable of what a good human editor can do for you. Perhaps you’re thinking, Well, of course you feel that way. You’d like to keep your job. And you’d be right to think so. I feel honored to work with authors for my job, and I’d like to continue doing it! Writing stories is an extremely human, enormously intricate process of imagination, creativity, and technical ability, and that means that human feedback on what’s produced is essential.

    We highly encourage you to seek out other people when it comes to getting feedback on your work—critique partners, a trusted friend, a reliable reader, an editor. As we well know, however, finding good critique partners is easier said than done, and friends and family often don’t have the time to read. Readers may not have the skills to help you improve, and you may not have the resources to hire a professional editor.

    These various circumstances make AI an appealing alternative—especially indie authors looking to keep costs low—and the two of us here at Ground Crew Editorial want to help you navigate your options, giving you our perspective on each of these platforms from our editorial viewpoint.

    As always, our goal is to help you develop in your craft.

    Our method

    For these reviews, I’ll be using a quite old fantasy short story of Jackie’s as a base text. I first performed my own edits on it (developmental, line, and copy editing), and I’ll be comparing the AI platform’s feedback to my own. I’ll be touching primarily on three areas:

    ·      Type and quality of feedback—What levels of editing can this program give you? Is it good at what it does? Are the suggestions useful?

    ·      User experience—Is it easy to use? How much control does the user have? Is this geared towards beginners or writing experts?

    ·      External factors—What are the terms of service for using this platform? Is the work stored or shared with others?

    Hemingway Editor App

    Hemingway Editing App (HEA) is an editorial platform that prides itself on making your writing “concise and correct.” It offers a free version that can be used in your web browser that offers basics like highlighting passive voice, adverbs, and basic grammar and spelling errors. The paid version, which can be used as a desktop app, offers AI tools for writers, including generating suggestions for rewrites, adding detail, adjusting tone, and shortening sentences.

    Hemingway App screenshot

    HEA’s highlights are color-coded:

    • Yellow: Sentences that are hard to read. These are sentences that HEA considers to be too long or complex.

    • Red: Sentences that are very hard to read. Like yellow highlights, HEA considers these sentences to be too long or complex.

    • Purple: Words with simpler alternatives. Riffing off the idea of “purple prose,” these highlights indicate words that can be changed for simpler synonyms.

    • Blue: Weakeners. These include qualifiers, passive voice, and adverbs.

    • Green: Spelling or grammar issues.


    I will doing a deep dive into the features of this platform with lots of examples, so heads up—this post will be a longer read than usual! If you want the TL;DR version, see below.

    Our review: short and sweet

    Hemingway Editing App offers a wide variety of AI tools but very few explanations about the changes that are made. It prioritizes readability by focusing on shortening sentences and simplifying word choice, and it strives to make writing concise (though not necessarily clearer or more accurate). It does not have a powerful grammar checker, and I found its line editing and copy editing capacities to be limited at best. I wouldn’t recommend it for novelists.


    Getting into the edit

    Developmental capabilities

    Being solely based on sentence-level analysis, HEA is not designed for developmental editing. It does not offer feedback on characters, storylines, or other big-picture concerns.

    Line editing capabilities

    I tried out all of HEA’s AI tools, which I’ll discuss in this section. You can click on the headings below to break out the discussion of each one.

    Copyediting capabilities

    Add detail feature

    This AI tool doesn’t really belong in any of the categories, being a word generator rather than an editing tool. It allows the user to select a sentence or a paragraph and add more to it.

    Example one

    Original: “Our commissioner’s up and tried to kill us.”

    Suggestion: Our commissioner, a man we trusted to lead and protect us, turned against us in a shocking act of betrayal. He deliberately plotted to take our lives, leaving us stunned and fighting for survival. Just like Julius Caesar's trusted friend Brutus, who infamously stabbed him in the back, our commissioner's treachery cut deep. We were caught off guard, our sense of security shattered by the sudden threat from within. The air was thick with tension as we scrambled to comprehend the magnitude of his deceit, our minds racing with questions: Why would he do this? What triggered such a drastic turn? And how could we have been so blind to his true intentions?

    I admit I laughed out loud when this result came up. It essentially made up a completely new story based on that one sentence, and it has the same air of melodrama that some of the other tools introduced. It’s very intense, and it wouldn’t be of any help to flesh out this part of the story.

    Example two

    Original: “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” he said, puffing vapor into the frozen air.

    Ask nodded and closed her eyes to conjure the heat of Kalvar’s bright beaches. She had been thinking about it often lately, more than she ever had in five years of wandering the Realms.

    Suggestion: He exhaled a plume of vapor into the crisp morning air, accompanied by a cheerful remark, “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” The frosty breeze carried his words, and Ask nodded in response, her gaze drifting downward as she shut her eyes. In her mind's eye, she escaped the chill, transported to the sun-kissed shores of Kalvar, where waves gently lapped at the sand. The memory of its radiant beaches had become a frequent refuge for her lately, more so than in all the five years she'd spent traversing the vast expanse of the Realms. The allure of that distant paradise had grown stronger with each passing day, beckoning her to return to a place where laughter and simplicity reigned supreme.

    This tool certainly lengthens the word count, but as far as adding significant detail, it won’t add original ideas. Though the suggestion is much longer, the information conveyed is essentially the same. The only thing that is new is that in the extended version, the place Ask is imagining is a far-off paradise where “laughter and simplicity reigned supreme.” The AI assumes Ask thinks Kalvar is a wonderful place, but from what the reader knows at this point in the story, Kalvar isn’t necessarily great, and Ask has been intentionally avoiding it for a reason.

    User experience

    Overall, HEA is easy to use. The interface is simple, and the color-coded highlighting makes it simple to navigate what kinds of issues are being identified. It also offers a writing mode that turns off all of the highlighting, allowing users who want to draft on the platform to write without those distractions. It constantly evaluates the grade level of the writing, and all suggestions are geared towards lowering that reading score. (As a side note, the website features a user guide with maybe more personality than it needs and dozens of AI-generated images of Ernest Hemingway, so if you’ve ever wanted to see Hemingway punching a robot in the face, head that way.)

    Few or no explanations

    Perhaps due to its simplicity and clear-cut approach, HEA does not have in-depth explanations for suggested changes. Offering “Fix it for me” buttons make the process of lowering the reading level easy, but it also means that a writer using this tool doesn’t get the explanation of how the issue should be resolved. If you are looking closely, you can start to pick out the patterns of suggestions that HEA makes, the most obvious one being that all complex sentences should be broken up into multiple simple sentences or words with fewer syllables should be used. These are two solutions for the problem, of course, but the platform can’t address whether the remaining sentences make sense or if they’re any clearer to a reader. In the same way, writers don’t have much opportunity to learn how to intentionally craft their tone to be “more persuasive” or “more friendly” because HEA has no explanation of what makes a tone persuasive or friendly. It simply makes the changes.

    AI sentences

    All of the AI tools require the use of “AI sentences,” and the user has a certain amount of these sentences available to them per month. An AI suggestion for one sentence counts as one credit. The basic subscription offers 5,000 sentences a month, while the premium subscription offers 10,000 a month. That might sound like a lot, but for comparison, the free trial that I was using gave me 200 sentences, and just for the examples I generated for this review, I used 125 of them. Novelists using these tools extensively would most likely run out of sentences before the month was over.

    The highlight system

    The highlighting that HEA offers is straightforward, and from other reviews that I read, it appears that many users like using it to identify recurring patterns in their work. For example, noticing that they have many complex sentences (yellow and red) in action scenes shows them that their pacing is probably slowing down too much in those areas. They can also start to see sentence structures that they use often, or see that they rely too heavily on adverbs.

    However, the highlight system can draw users into clearing the highlights rather than making decisions about the sentences flagged. It would be easy to slip into an editing mode focused solely on eliminating all of the highlights to get a “perfect score,” like a game. However, as I’ve shown, not everything flagged needs to be changed, and some recommended changes are errors. Clearing the highlights wouldn’t necessarily mean that you have a polished text. It would just mean that you’ve trimmed and conformed your text to HEA’s standards of reading level, sentence length, and recommended avoidance of certain words and structures. (As a side note, I don’t believe adverbs are the enemy.)

    I also noticed that while I was checking my text with HEA, I didn’t pay much attention at all to text that wasn’t highlighted. The highlighting system can encourage a kind of tunnel vision on correcting errors in isolation, one sentence at a time, when the real problem might be a whole paragraph, or even a whole page. It also doesn’t check for repetition, such as echoed words or sentences starting the same way, or repeated information.

    External factors (a.k.a. I read the Terms and Conditions so you don’t have to)

    When thinking about using an AI platform to edit your work, you should not just consider the functionality of the tool, but also what you are agreeing to by using the platform itself. I know we live in the area of infinitely long Terms and Conditions agreements that no one has time to read, but AI is still very new territory, and you should know what arrangements and risks you are consenting to by using any platform. A few important things to note about HEA from the Terms of Service:

    • You must be 18 or older to use the platform.

    • The terms can be updated or modified at any time without providing notice to the users. It is the responsibility of the users to regularly check the terms and the privacy policy. Continuing to use the platform is taken as agreement to the new terms.

    • HEA uses OpenAI, so the OpenAI terms of service apply to HEA users.

      • This means that your information and the content you put on the platform may be used for model training and improvement.

      • Your input may be shared and reviewed by a person, including third-party contractors all over the world.

      • HEA has no control over the use of the input (your content).

      • Use is at the user’s risk.

    • HEA assures that you own the input and grants you rights and title to the output, but it does not guarantee that the output does not violate another party’s intellectual rights.

    • They recommend adding a disclosure that the output was created with AI tools.

    • They do not allow content that contains explicit, graphic descriptions, or accounts of sexual acts. So if you write high spice, open-door romance or erotica, this platform is not for you.

    • Due to the nature of machine learning, output, in whole or in part, will not be unique across users and AI functionality may generate the same or similar output for third parties. So the recommendations, especially tools like “Add detail,” may generate the exact same text for another writer.

    • By use of the platform, you agree that you will not mislead anyone that content generated is human-generated. I believe that this is why they suggest adding a disclosure about using AI tools, as it doesn’t seem to be recommending marking the sentences that were revised with their tools.

    • By providing any content on the platform (sharing your writing), you grant HEA an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, and display your content (anonymously) to improve the platform.

    • Using the platform means you consent to their collection, use, disclosure, transfer, and sharing of your personal information with third parties. When I looked into the privacy policy, I found that this information can include your identifiers, contact information, IP address, browsing history and search engine results on the device used to access HEA, transactional information, where you live and where you’re located when using the platform, clicked links, and access and session times.

    Conclusion

    Having compared HEA’s recommendations to my own edit and explored the AI tools, I found that HEA is most suited for content writing that needs to be snappy and simple. It most likely excels at short-form content that needs to fulfill a particular purpose, such as social media posts, informational blog posts, and emails. Because of the platform’s priority on readability, revisions are focused on lowering the reading level—via shorter sentences and shorter words—which may or may not be appropriate for your project. A better “score” on HEA would not necessarily indicate a polished manuscript or a satisfying story for a novelist. Its suggestions also tend to take away unique features of an author’s voice and replace them with expected phrases or clichés. While sometimes helpful, the generated text, at worst, is overdramatic and exaggerated in its purpose to make all verbs strong and active, and because it will not use any of the same words as the original when you ask it to rephrase, you can end up with a case of thesaurus overload.

    Jackie and I reviewed a manuscript earlier this year that had a certain style that neither of us could quite describe—reading it felt like wading in molasses because every sentence was so powerful, even if what was being described was quite mundane, and it had a certain cyclical pattern, like waves of description beating against the shore of the same idea again and again. I’ve edited hundreds of manuscripts, and I’d never come across writing like it. Having now seen HEA’s generative features for myself, I think that there’s a high chance this manuscript leaned heavily on AI-generated text. I was astonished at how “literary” it reads at first glance—I had no idea it could read so smoothly. But on a close read, the generated text can often feel belabored, vague, or both. As with all tools, how useful it will be depends on the skill of the user.

    I don’t believe HEA is a good tool for novelists looking to develop their own writing chops because it offers to make the fixes for you without explaining how it is solving the issue, and it also doesn’t have a powerful grammar checker, which makes Hemingway a poor text editor. The user guide tries to make it clear that the goal is not to eliminate every highlighted sentence, but it would be easy to fall into that trap, especially as a beginning writer. The guide says, “You don’t need to fix every yellow or red sentence. Instead, focus on the worst offenders and try to bring your overall score down.” But how would does a writer know which are the worst “offenders”? And what score should they aim for? This score would depend largely on your intended audience.

    For this project, Jackie and I intentionally chose a piece of writing that wasn’t going to be submitted for publication and didn’t include characters/main concepts that she intended to use in another story. We all have our own comfort level with AI platforms, so you will have to make the determination for yourself about sharing your work in this way. A platform like HEA has a low price point, but from the terms and conditions, it’s clear that an important part of the exchange for writers is giving over a lot of information, as well as allowing access to that information and all text on the platform to a range of third parties. HEA makes it clear that they do not ultimately control how the content is used, and they cannot guarantee that the text it generates does not infringe on another writer’s intellectual property. As the terms state and restate, using the platform is at your own risk, and they are not responsible for any output.

    For writers looking for an AI platform to edit their book-length manuscripts, I would recommend looking into other options.

    Have more questions?

    There’s a lot of info here, so if you’re still processing or have more questions, I’m happy to chat anytime at ariane[at]groundcreweditorial[dot]com.

    Have another AI editing software you’d like us to review? Let us know!


     
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    Ariane Peveto

    Ariane Peveto is a writer and editor who has called the US, England, and Japan home for a time. From fantasy to sci-fi, she writes for the upper MG/lower YA space. She helps other authors through her work at Ground Crew Editorial and volunteers with SCBWI.

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