It is so important that we are clear and concise with our communication.
And today, I'm not actually going to focus on our verbal communication but our written communication.
And no, I'm not talking about short pieces of text like email or text messaging.
Today, I want to look at some longer forms of communication.
Things like a blog article, or maybe a report that you need to write, or perhaps it's even just some content that you post on your website.
It is so important that we are clear and concise with our communication.
There's a vast audience out there, right?
There's millions of unknown readers who may stumble across your article or stumble across your website.
You want to make sure that whatever it is that you're writing, it is easy for your viewers, for your audience, to digest.
Today, I want to share with you.
The Hemingway App
A free app called the Hemingway app—you can find it at Hemingwayapp.com—and that's precisely its purpose: to take whatever you have written and to help you make it bold and clear.
Here's how the Hemingway app works.
When you first visit Hemingwayapp.com, it's actually going to pre-populate the editor with some text, some default text, and it's gonna actually help you explain what the Hemingway editor does.
I'm gonna start with some of the metrics and some of the data that it's showing us here on the right-hand side of the screen.
First, it gives us a readability grade, and in this case, it's saying that the text over here on the left is a grade 6 readability, and it's saying that that is good.
Now, it's my experience that as this grade level goes down a bit closer to, I think, grade 3 or grade 4, this good actually turns to great.
And, you know, you want to think about that for a second.
Think of the variety of people who may be consuming your content.
These are people from various different back—whether it's socioeconomic backgrounds or just language—where something like English may be their second or third language.
You want to make sure that you're communicating at a level that the most amount of people can digest it and consume it with ease.
Metrics
Now, it's also going to give us some other metrics here, such as word count and character count.
You're going to find that almost anywhere, including a basic word document.
But it also has an estimated reading time, which might be helpful.
How long would you expect someone to take to read this content?
But the really good stuff, I think, is the colorful stuff that you will find down here.
And this acts as both a guide and a bit of a key as to what is happening here on the screen in front of us.
You can see that many of these sentences and several of the words are highlighted in different colors.
What exactly does that mean?
So let's go through them one by one.
The first one, highlighted blue, is highlighting adverbs.
And depending on how much you have written, it's going to tell you what your goal is or sort of what the minimum is.
And here it says that it's found two adverbs, meeting the goal of two or fewer.
Again, this is based on how many total words are in the article or in the document.
If you write more words, well, you're going to be permitted more adverbs.
But you can use this information and decide if you want to omit these adverbs or change them, or are you fine with them.
The green one is similar, but this time it's looking at the passive voice.
And again, it says that you should aim for two or fewer based on the number of words here.
And they are highlighted in green.
Simpler Words
Shade has to do with using simpler words, and they will provide a simpler alternative.
So here in the second paragraph, you can see that in their default text, they've used the word "utilize."
You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one.
Well, there is a simpler alternative to "utilize."
When you hover over that text, it's going to give you a suggestion.
We can either replace it or maybe just try to omit it altogether.
If I like the suggestion, I can click on it, and it just replaces it.
And there you can see that now that purplish shade is gone.
I can move on to something else and decide if I want to make changes there as well.
The last two shades—the first one is yellow, and then the last one, sort of a reddish-pinkish—has to do with the complexity of a sentence.
Yellow identifies sentences that are hard to read.
Here, you see we have an opening sentence, and then the pinkish color identifies sentences that are very hard to read now the great.
Editing
thing about the Hemingway app is that you can edit this and it can make the changes dynamically so in this first sentence a simple fix would be just to split this one up I'm going to delete and put a period there and let's put a capital there on the on the if and now you can see that that yellow is gone it's a much easier sentence to read for the audience to come along and consume this and hopefully continue to read the rest of this article or this this report now you of course don't need to make all
of these changes to make your writing as clear and concise as possible but what I do like about the Hemingway app is that it highlights these facts and then you can make the decision if you want to make changes if you want to make these edits based on the recommendations here now one thing is I don't recommend that
Writing
You actually do your writing within the Hemingway app.
If I select everything here and delete it, I can easily get a back blank screen, and I can start to type out my article or maybe my website content.
But this is a web app, and so nothing is actually being saved as I go along.
The second reason why I don't recommend that you write within the Hemingway editor is that with all of these shades that are coming up as you write, sometimes that can be a little tricky in terms of identifying.
You know, you can get stuck on a certain passage and say, "Oh, well, maybe I should say it this way or say it that way," when what you're looking for is more of a flow, right?
Where you're looking to just get things down on screen and not really think about editing should always really be the second part of the writing process.
Now, it does give you the option here in the top right-hand corner.
You can select "Write," and then it's gonna hide all of this information here, and it will not highlight things as you go.
But again, I prefer to write in a place where things are going to be saved, and I can always paste it in here later.
So that's typically what I'll do.
Let me go and grab some text that I've written previously, and I'm just gonna paste it here into the editor just to show you what it looks like.
So, you know, immediately you don't have to write it in the app to get the benefits of the app.
Here you can see it's highlighting some of my sentences, some of my words, and what I like to change these.
And it's giving me the data on the right-hand side, and you can see how things like my adverbs and passive voice, the minimum number has increased because this is a much longer article than the first one we used in this example.
So from a workflow perspective, I'll often write in a different document, whether that's a Word document, or sometimes I'll use The Most Dangerous App, which is another online tool, but I find a really effective tool for getting into flow and to continue writing.
You can find more about that app in a previous video.
But in most cases, what I will do is I will write first, and then when I'm sort of ready to publish or almost close to posting that article or posting that piece of content, I will paste it in the Hemingway app.
And then I'll make some final touches, right?
I'll see the suggestions here, I'll see the words or the sentences that are highlighted, and make those changes there.
I have even used the Hemingway editor once in a while for very important emails.
You know, I want to be clear, I want to be concise, and we know when it comes to email communication, if you're not clear, chances are your email may be ignored, or you know someone will never come back to it later.
You want to be as clear and concise as possible.
So even in a few important emails, I've used the Hemingway editor, and for my website, even if it's just two or three paragraphs in a certain section of my website, I find the Hemingway editor can give me a little bit of reassurance that what I've written is concise and can be consumed by a broader audience.
If you have had experience with the Hemingway app or a similar app, I would love to hear about it.
Please include your feedback or your comments and questions in the comments section below.
And if you like this video, please go ahead and give it a thumbs up and subscribe.
We would love to have you as a part of the Simpletivity community.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
