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Hemingway Editor Plus Review — Do Its AI Features Improve Readability?

Can the AI features of Hemingway Editor Plus help improve readability? See if this tool makes your writing easier and clearer to understand

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Introduction

Our text compare tool is a fantastic, lightweight tool that provides plagiarism checks between two documents. Whether you are a student, blogger or publisher, this tool offers a great solution to detect and compare similarities between any two pieces of text. In this article, I will discuss the different ways to use the tool, the primary features of the tool and who this tool is for. There is an FAQ at the bottom if you run into any issues when trying to use the tool.

What makes Originality.ai’s text comparison tool stand out?

Keyword density helper – This tool comes with a built-in keyword density helper in some ways similar to the likes of SurferSEO or MarketMuse the difference being, ours is free! This feature shows the user the frequency of single or two word keywords in a document, meaning you can easily compare an article you have written against a competitor to see the major differences in keyword densities. This is especially useful for SEO’s who are looking to optimize their blog content for search engines and improve the blog’s visibility.

Ways to compare

File compare – Text comparison between files is a breeze with our tool. Simply select the files you would like to compare, hit “Upload” and our tool will automatically insert the content into the text area, then simply hit “Compare” and let our tool show you where the differences in the text are. By uploading a file, you can still check the keyword density in your content.

URL compare

Comparing text between URLs is effortless with our tool. Simply paste the URL you would like to get the content from (in our example we use a fantastic blog post by Sherice Jacob found here) hit “Submit URL” and our tool will automatically retrieve the contents of the page and paste it into the text area, then simply click “Compare” and let our tool highlight the difference between the URLs. This feature is especially useful for checking keyword density between pages!

Simple text compare

You can also easily compare text by copying and pasting it into each field, as demonstrated below.

Features of Originality.ai’s Text Compare Tool

Ease of use

Our text compare tool is created with the user in mind, it is designed to be accessible to everyone. Our tool allows users to upload files or enter a URL to extract text, this along with the lightweight design ensures a seamless experience. The interface is simple and straightforward, making it easy for users to compare text and detect the diff.

Multiple text file format support

Our tool provides support for a variety of different text files and microsoft word formats including pdf file, .docx, .odt, .doc, and .txt, giving users the ability to compare text from different sources with ease. This makes it a great solution for students, bloggers, and publishers who are looking for file comparison in different formats.

Protects intellectual property

Our text comparison tool helps you protect your intellectual property and helps prevent plagiarism. This tool provides an accurate comparison of texts, making it easy to ensure that your work is original and not copied from other sources. Our tool is a valuable resource for anyone looking to maintain the originality of their content.

User Data Privacy

Our text compare tool is secure and protects user data privacy. No data is ever saved to the tool, the users’ text is only scanned and pasted into the tool’s text area. This makes certain that users can use our tool with confidence, knowing their data is safe and secure.

Compatibility

Our text comparison tool is designed to work seamlessly across all size devices, ensuring maximum compatibility no matter your screen size. Whether you are using a large desktop monitor, a small laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, this tool adjusts to your screen size. This means that users can compare texts and detect the diff anywhere without the need for specialized hardware or software. This level of accessibility makes it an ideal solution for students or bloggers who value the originality of their work and need to compare text online anywhere at any time.

Hemingway Editor has long been a staple in the toolkit of any writer looking to craft short, memorable prose. Now, with Hemingway Editor Plus, the tool has made a decisive leap forward, integrating AI that’s designed to help improve readability

In a time where AI is often bolted as a buzzword, do Hemingway Editor Plus’ AI features really work to make content more readable? We take a closer look under the hood to see how it works and how its features stack up against traditional editing.

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or you’re just starting out, knowing how Hemingway Editor Plus works and whether its AI features make it worth the upgrade can make a big difference in how you write. 

What Is Hemingway Editor Plus?

Hemingway Editor Plus is a more advanced version of the popular Hemingway Editor. The platform highlights errors and areas for improvement, and now, through the use of its AI integration, it intends to provide instant corrections and suggestions for a smarter, more free-flowing editing process.

Hemingway Editor Plus vs. the Free Hemingway Version

The free version of the Hemingway Editor can highlight common grammar issues like passive voice or overuse of adverbs. With the free version, you also cannot save files directly through the browser, nor can you export to different formats. 

Hemingway Editor Plus costs $100 per year ($8.33 USD per month). The plus version uses AI to provide rewriting suggestions for greater clarity and conciseness. AI-powered sentence corrections cost credits to perform, and the subscription plan gives you access to 5,000 credits. 

Beyond just pointing out the issues, Hemingway Editor Plus will immediately fix them, rewriting complex sentences to be clearer and changing passive to active voice. It does this all while attempting to match the general style of the writer. 

How Hemingway Editor Plus Checks Sentence Complexity

At its core, Hemingway Editor uses its famous color-coded highlighting system, where: 

  • Yellow indicates hard-to-read sentences
  • Red indicates very hard-to-read sentences
  • Purple indicates complex words or phrases with simpler options

The editor then provides a readability score. The Hemingway Editor determines the readability or complexity of a piece by measuring it according to what approximate (U.S.) grade level the content can be read at. 

Hemingway Editor’s readability score definition

It’s likely that sentence length plays a role in what the app determines as complex, as it will also highlight complex words and suggest alternatives. 

Testing the Readability of This Article

We reviewed the tool as part of its free 2-week trial to find out how effective Hemingway Editor Plus is at improving readability.

To start, we pasted a part of this article into the editor to find out the readability score

Hemingway Editor Plus provided us with the following score: 

An example of the readability score using Hemingway Editor Plus

As expected, the editor did a broad overall scan and pointed out things that could be worded better. 

In comparison, the Originality.ai Readability Checker provides several readability scores across a variety of readability scales so you can best tailor content readability to your audience.

Originality.ai’s Readability Checker

Next, it was time to take its AI features for a spin. 

Hemingway's AI Rewrite Features

When you start, Hemingway’s AI rewrite features come with the following note, “Red and yellow highlights identify sentences that are too wordy. Click on one and then click "Fix it for me" to have our AI suggest a rewrite.”  

When you do this, you’re prompted with a suggestion, which you can then have the AI make or let it suggest another alternative:

Hemingway’s AI suggestion brought the writing from an 11th-grade to a 4th-grade reading level.

In the example above, the tool replaced “is often bolted on as a buzzword” with “is just a buzzword” and shortened one longer sentence into two.

Is that really enough to go from an 11th-grade reading level to a 4th-grade reading level?

In some cases, the editor’s AI made questionable editing decisions. Although its suggestions may have simplified the text, it made leaps from switching around a few words to claiming it improved readability — from a 12th to a 6th-grade level. 

Example:

Can changing a few words improve readability by six entire grade levels?

The text also reads as more robotic and bland. It reads like less of a review and more like a choppy instruction manual. 

Next, we reviewed its other AI features. How did it do with passive voice? 

Can Hemingway’s AI Effectively Identify Passive Voice? 

I purposefully rewrote a sentence of the article to include passive voice: 

Interestingly, Hemingway Editor Plus didn’t catch the passive voice, but the blue underline indicated that Grammarly, which I have running in my browser, did. 

In fact, when the tool encountered another instance of passive voice, it highlighted it in blue and offered to “Fix it for me.” Because the AI version supposedly highlights in green, it’s unclear if the error was found by the default scanner or by the AI. 

Fixing passive voice with AI is supposed to highlight errors in green. However, passive voice is highlighted in blue and it’s uncertain whether or not it was detected by AI or the default Hemingway Editor

Can Hemingway’s AI Fix Sentences Without Making Them Sound Robotic?

The verdict on this one? Not really. 

Using Hemingway’s AI “fixes” makes the writing more concise but also makes it read like a machine created it. It prioritized sentence length and complexity over creating content for people. It got to the point where a well-written blog post reads more like a fourth-grade book report. 

The same idea applies to Hemingway Editor Plus’ AI tools for fixing a paragraph. Keep in mind that you don’t have to choose the default AI suggestion; Hemingway Editor Plus will give you several options to choose from if you don’t like the first AI version. 

Hemingway’s Readability Scores: Accurate or Misleading? 

Hemingway relies entirely on grade level as a way of determining readability, but this is only one of many different readability score methods available. Is having access to more and different types of readability checkers better? 

In comparison, Originality.ai’s Readability Checker will review text according to a number of popular readability scores, including: 

  • Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
  • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
  • Gunning Fog Index
  • SMOG Index
  • Powers Sumner-Kearl
  • FORCAST Grade Level
  • Coleman-Liau Index
  • Automated Readability index 
  • Dale-Chall Readability Grade
  • Spache Readability Grade
  • Linear Write Grade

To view these scores in the Originality.ai Readability Checker, navigate to the ‘Metrics’ tab.

Originality.ai Readability Checker Scores

Rather than relying on a single readability score to gauge how understandable your content is, having multiple scores (each with its own formula) gives you a much broader picture of the readability of your text. 

Plus, knowing how each readability formula is calculated and who it’s intended for can help you tailor your writing to fit that audience, instead of going solely by approximate grade level. 

So, while simplifying your sentences does make them more readable and easier to understand, it also removes all of the nuance and flow of the writing, making it sound disjointed. 

When you see sentence after sentence. Written exactly like this. It starts to become repetitive. And difficult to read. 

Does Using Hemingway AI Label My Writing as AI-Generated? 

If you hover over highlighted sections and constantly click “fix it for me,” review the AI suggestion and apply it, it comes with a significant caveat. 

After having Hemingway Editor Plus’ AI “fix” sentence complexity into simpler versions, we ran a part of the resulting writing through the Originality.ai AI Detector

Using Hemingway Editor’s AI fixes may increase the AI score of your content

The Originality.ai AI Checker identified the copy as likely AI with 100% confidence.

The Bottom Line on Using Hemingway Editor Plus

Hemingway is great at spotting points that make your writing difficult to follow. Needlessly wordy, winding sentences, passive voice and overuse of adverbs can clutter the flow.

If you’re looking to write in a way that’s more straightforward, even bordering on technical, for a broader audience, Hemingway’s AI assistant and readability scores can give you a decent way to gauge the simplicity of your writing. 

Keep in mind, however, no tool is without its limitations, and no algorithm is perfect. Because Hemingway is so focused on simplicity, it can completely remove the underlying context and nuance of a piece.

For example, if you’re writing an article for data scientists or you’re explaining something particularly complex, you need a deeper, richer vocabulary or longer sentences to make it fully understandable. Hemingway penalizes you for this, and your writing can become too simple because of it.

Then, using Hemingway Editor for more unique writing also strips out the creativity and voice.

Ideally, a tool like this is best used as an assistant to editing processes.

No one knows your audience like you do, and simpler doesn’t always mean better. While Hemingway Editor Plus offers a good starting point for creating more accessible content, it should be used as one of many editing tools rather than the definitive judge of whether or not something is “good writing.”

Sherice Jacob

Sherice Jacob is a seasoned copywriter and content professional fluent in English, Spanish, and Catalan, with over 25 years of experience crafting high-converting copy. Passionate about AI, she enjoys exploring the new innovations and possibilities it brings to the world of content creation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to fill out the entire form?

No, that’s one of the benefits, only fill out the areas which you think will be relevant to the prompts you require.

Why is the English so poor for some prompts?

When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.

In The Press

Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…

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Featured by Leading Publications

Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.

Vahan Petrosyan

searchenginejournal.com

I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.

Tom Demers

searchengineland.com

After extensive research and testing, we determined Originality.ai to be the most accurate technology.

Rock Content Team

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Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.

Felix Rose-Collins

ranktracker.com

ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai

Ashley Stahl

forbes.com

Originality.ai Do give them a shot! 

Sri Krishna

venturebeat.com

For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.

Industry Trends

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to check for plagiarism?

Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.

What is Text Comparison?

Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.

How do Text Comparison Tools Work?

Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.

The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.

String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.

What is Syntax Highlighting?

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.

How Can I Conduct a Plagiarism Check between Two Documents Online?

With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Text Compare Tool?

Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.

What Files Can You Inspect with This Text Compare Tool?

We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.

Will My Data Be Shared?

There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.

Software License Agreement

Copyright © 2023, Originality.ai

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

  1. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Will My Data Be Shared?

This table below shows a heat map of features on other sites compared to ours as you can see we almost have greens across the board!

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