When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing.<p>I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way.<p>So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's <i>The Lottery</i> and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, <i>The Lottery</i> is considered a masterpiece of a short story, and is widely taught in American high schools.) The excerpts I pasted were almost universally painted red: bad writing, "very hard to read."<p>Then I took excerpts of Isaac Asimov's <i>The Last Question</i>, another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over.<p>Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's <i>The Great Automatic Grammatizator</i> -- red and yellow all over.<p>Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original <i>Winnie the Pooh</i> books. Finally, something it was mostly okay with! But only the dialogue. Anytime the author dared to write any description, red all over.<p>Seriously, don't use this tool.<p>Edited perspective from comment replies to mine: the app is largely okay with Hemingway, which makes sense as its main intent is to make your writing <i>like Hemingway's</i>. Also, if it is largely intended to be for business writing, then it makes sense that it would react poorly to literary writing. Both good points!