Readability
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
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.
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.
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.
At its core, Hemingway Editor uses its famous color-coded highlighting system, where:
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.
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.
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:
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.
Next, it was time to take its AI features for a spin.
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:
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:
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?
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
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 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:
To view these scores in the Originality.ai Readability Checker, navigate to the ‘Metrics’ tab.
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.
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.
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.”
