Hemingway Editor App – Improve Your Content’s Readability Score

By Emma Crameri Emma Crameri has been verified by Muck Rack's editorial team
on 15 January 2024

Less is more with the Hemingway Editor App because it is a tool that helps you write more succintly. You can use the online Hemingway Editor to make your writing easy to read and this also makes it more SEO friendly.

Easy to use, just type straight into the webpage or copy and paste your content into the website.

The app will give your writing a readability score. You’ll want to aim for a Good with a Grade 6 or 7 score. This means that a person needs at least a 7th-grade education to understand your text.

The right-hand side of the app shows the total word count. You can expand this section to see more stats including letters, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time.

Then you will see a colour-coded summary of items to fix.

  • Blue: Adverb count
  • Green: passive voice
  • Purple: phrases with simpler alternatives
  • Yellow: number of sentences that are hard to read
  • Red: number of sentences that are very hard to read

Typically, you can shorten any sentences that have been highlighted in yellow. These may be lengthy and complex. A sentence highlighted in red may be too dense and complicated for most of your readers to understand.

You can fix your writing with artificial intelligence (AI) such as wordy sentences, passive voice and more.

Hemingway is ideal for improving articles, text documents and short reports. It does not check spelling and punctuation or offer formatting suggestions.

Image Credit: Hemingway

The app was named after the US novelist Ernest Hemingway, who was hailed for writing short sentences. He wrote prose that was direct and clear so that readers could understand his message.

While working on a website content refresh project, we used Hemingway to check the content met our target audience’s needs. The website audience included adults, people of different educational backgrounds and people for whom English may be their second language. We rewrote the content to ensure most of the web pages had a reading level of high school.

By improving the readability score, there was a greater chance of search engines ranking the content favourably. I like to use Grammarly for Chrome to review spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement and delivery mistakes in the browser.

The free version is good but you can only use it in the browser. You can pay for a subscription which gives you credits to suggest sentence rewrites. The desktop version lets you export the files to HTML, PDF or Microsoft Word. There is no mobile app or browser extension.

Hemingway and Grammarly are two powerful ways to improve the readability of your content.

You can try the improve your text at the online Hemingway Editor (hemingwayapp.com)

About Hemingway Editor App

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. It’s like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose.

The Hemingway Editor will highlight (in yellow and red) where your writing is too dense. Try removing needless words or splitting the sentence into two. Your readers will thank you.

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