Several people have written to me about the so-called "Hemingway" app, which offers to give you detailed stylistic advice about your writing. One useful way to evaluate programs of this kind is to see what they do with good writing — and given this effort's name, it makes sense to check out its opinion about the prose of Ernest Hemingway.
Here's the first paragraph of Hemingway's 1923 story My Old Man:
I guess looking at it now my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn't his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he'd pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He'd have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo's skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o'clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I'd help him pull off his boots and he'd get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we'd start out.
Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "Bad". The alleged problems:
1 of 3 sentences are hard to read.
2 of 3 sentences are very hard to read.
1 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer.
Here's the start of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (minus some dialogue):
The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.
He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "OK". The problems:
2 of 4 sentences are hard to read.
1 of 4 sentences are very hard to read.
2 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer.
A paragraph from a bit later in the same work:
That was the day he'd first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and the of ficers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse. So when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And there in the cafe as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the office sent his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the one he'd written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the hand writing he went cold all over and tried to slip the letter underneath another. But his wife said, "Who is that letter from, dear?" and that was the end of the beginning of that.
Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "Bad". The problems:
3 of 7 sentences are very hard to read.
3 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer.
The start of For Whom the Bell Tolls (again minus the dialogue):
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.
He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.
Bending under the weight of the packs, sweating, they climbed steadily in the pine forest that covered the mountainside. There was no trail that the young man could see, but they were working up and around the face of the mountain and now they crossed a small stream and the old man went steadily on ahead up the edge of the rocky stream bed. The climbing now was steeper and more difficult, until finally the stream seemed to drop down over the edge of a smooth granite ledge that rose above them and the old man waited at the foot of the ledge for the young man to come up to him.
Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "OK". The problems:
3 of 10 sentences are hard to read.
2 of 10 sentences are very hard to read.
5 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer.
The first paragraph of The Old Man and the Sea:
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked the the flag of permanent defeat.
Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "OK". The problems:
2 of five sentences are very hard to read.
2 uses of passive voice. Aim for 1 or fewer.
So a clear verdict is emerging: Ernest Hemingway was a poor to fair writer, whose writing is hard to read and who generally uses too many adverbs.
He's in good ("bad"?) company. The first two paragraphs of The Great Gatsby are rated "Bad" ("3 of 8 sentences are hard to read. 3 of 8 sentences are very hard to read. 6 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer.") The first paragraph of To the Lighthouse is rated "Bad" ("3 of 4 sentences are very hard to read. 5 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer. 2 uses of passive voice. Aim for 1 or fewer.") The first three sentences of the Declaration of Independence are rated "Bad" ("3 of 3 sentences are very hard to read. 2 words or phrases can be simpler. 3 uses of passive voice. Aim for 1 or fewer.")
I could go on, but I think this is enough.
Update — It's worth noting that the "readability" index depends on word frequency (or maybe just word length?) as well as sentence length. Thus this document, though "Good":
is not quite as readable as this one:
Of course, neither one got dinged for too many passives or too many adverbs (since apparently to count as an adverb, a word in -ly needs to have another attested word as the pre-ly base…
And to understand this next one, you need to be in the 26th grade, which according to my calculations means four years of college (=16th grade), six years of grad school (=22nd grade), two years of post-doc (=24th grade), and then I'm not sure, two more years of kindergarten or something:
… OK, turns out it's just word length, not word frequency: