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.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.So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery 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."Then I took excerpts of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over.Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator -- red and yellow all over.Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original Winnie the Pooh books. Finally, something it was mostly okay with! But only the dialogue. Anytime the author dared to write any description, red all over.Seriously, don't use this tool.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 like Hemingway's. 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!