Hope you had a bearable April Fools’ Day, reporters! (And International Fact-Checking Day). I’m a little burned out on all the misinformation-busting and image-vetting, so let’s do something completely different.
Hemingway, a site named for the patron saint of short, punchy prose, lets you know if your writing is too, uh, Faulkner.
I tried it on my recent story for The Lens, and got a score of 10 – meaning, my story could be read and understood by a 10th-grader. Better, it identifies sentences and even words that you can edit within the app, simplifying them and making them more easily understandable.
I tried another app as well, called Dejargonizer, but found it a little too aggressive. (I don’t really consider “sheriffs” or “ticketed” to be jargon words?)
Either way, Hemingway’s style is always a good way to go for news writing, so it can’t hurt to give your stories a run-through. As the man himself supposedly said, write drunk and edit sober!