Powerful Editing Tool

In a creative writing class, we were taught to avoid adverbs if at all possible. I had spent this other class (a class on writing a novella) wishing for a "highlight adverbs" feature in Microsoft Word, or in Scrivener.

I hit Scrivener's feature request forum and did a search on "adverbs." Who'd have guessed I wasn't the first person to have the idea. The request was denied, but one of the comments referenced The Hemingway Editor.

The Hemingway Editor is a web-based app, but there is a downloadable desktop app. I only used the web-based one. It allows you to paste text into the editor, or compose within it.

 The app highlights adverbs, passive voice, difficult-to-read sentences, and overly-complex usages.

It grades your writing based on the number of sentences and words. The lower the grade, the better the writing. The grade may be commiserate with school grade levels - i.e., if it's rated a grade 4, a 4th grader could read it.

Pros:

You can paste a surprising amount of text into that window and it doesn't crash. Like, more than 5,500 words.

The mechanism to find difficult-to-read sentences is nuanced enough that it has two levels of difficulty, "hard" and "very hard."

It highlights "wordiness." It found all the times I said "in order to" when "to" would have worked, and all the times I said "all of" instead of just "all." It also found fancy-shmancy words like "consolidate" and "portion." When you hover over a wordy word, it recommends a simpler word or phrase.

You can format the text in the editor. There are options to make lists, use bold and italics, and the normal rich-text options.

Cons:

It doesn't find all the adverbs. It finds the ones with an "ly" ending, but misses "only," "even," "never," and some others.

If you paste a lot of words into the app, it can get confused. Switching the toggle from Edit to Write, pasting the text, and toggling back to Edit fixes this.

Pasting from Scrivener really confused Hemingway. The hard returns didn't transfer over, and this had an impact on the grading and on which sentences it thought were "very difficult." Often, adding a hard return where there should have been one downgraded the difficulty level and upped my grade.

It really wants you to write short sentences. Sentences without clauses. Simple sentences, with only one comma. That's great sometimes, but gets old after a while. I blame Hemingway himself for that one.

Plotting Help

Now that NaNoWriMo is almost at a close, you probably don't need this tool - unless you write during the "off-season," or are a struggling college student, like me.

I'm in the middle of a two-month class aimed at teaching students to write a novella - a ~100 page story, which we'll self-publish at the end of class.

I found myself in an existential plot crisis. Even though I had a strong start, I couldn't figure out where this novella was going. I needed some serious plot help. I Googled "plot diagram" and landed on this interactive tool.

Once you enter in your name and title, it presents a "mountain." You can use the slider bar at the bottom to change where the peak is (allowing for more or less rising and falling action). 

You enter in an event and a description, and drag and drop it to where you want it on the "mountain." Downside: once you drag that event, the only part that will be visible is the event title. You can't get back to see or edit your event description.

Hitting print will allow you to print or save the final version, but you can add events after you "print." Once you start over or navigate off the page, your work will be lost, so if you want to keep it, print it. This is what it'll look like:

Happy writing!

Edit: I found another interesting downside to this working aid: The events are numbered on the printed page as you entered them. So, using the example above, if you entered in Problem 1, then the Major Crisis, and then went back and entered in Problem 2, the bottom of your printout will list them as:
1. Character Intro
2. Problem 1
3. Major Crisis
4. Problem 2
5. Resolution 1

It's still a useful working aid... it's just not perfect.

Adventures in Translation - Family

Demaryius Thomas has a tattoo that said "Family." He said, "Family - I love 'em all." And then there was ESPN's slogan, Football is family. Whatevs.

I thought, what if I got that tattoo in Arabic? I'm not into tattoos of words - even in a foreign language, even in a beautifully written one, like Arabic - but if I were into that, the tattoo would say الاهل - al-Ahal. The folks. Family.

Like اهل الكتاب - ahal al-Kitab - people of the Book. Believers. Jews, Christians, Muslims. Family.

Like اهلي - Ahali - my family.

Like اهوال الدنيا - Ahwal al-Dunya - Peoples of the world. Family.

Yes, there are other words for family. I think أسرة - usrah - is more "proper."

Greetings in Arabic can be extensive. "How are you? How's your health? How are your affairs? How's your family?" all rapid-fire, while the other person says, "Good, thank God, thank God, good."

The word used - at least in my experience - isn't the proper usrah, but the more general اهل. How are your people? Your family?

Chaucer Hath Mad Jokes

I was supposed to be a discussion leader for the discussion on selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales this week, but there was a bit of a communications error, and my thunder totally got stolen. That's okay - I'm pretty sure I'll get to do Arthurian Heroes, which is almost as cool.

I had gone to some trouble to prepare this "Discussion Leader" post, and had thought of two things I really wanted to share in addition to the academic bits. So I whipped up some rhymed couplets. *Ahem* Forthwith:

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a mighty blog
Which loaded with witticisms is; that churlish dog
Updates his posts on so seldom a moon,
Causing geeks like me to nearly swoon.
One may find the blog (and ken the dog anon)
At House of Flame, blogspot dot com
But whilst I dally with you here a time,
Allow a goodwife yet one more little rhyme.
I saw a comic upon the Google Plus,
As I was dawdling on this forum; it is attached, thus,
Click the attachment and humor you will see,
About the Middle Ages, that which tickles me.

The school's forum thingie is painfully out-moded, so the image below was an attachment that had to be "clicked" rather than just displayed in the post.

By the way, if you need a bawdy laugh, and/or if you haven't recently, find a nearby copy of the Tales, and read the Wife of Bath's Tale. Omg. Hysterical.