语言与文风2014newyorker.com
海明威接受海明威测试
Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test
导读
这篇《纽约客》文章围绕 Hemingway 写作风格检测应用展开：把海明威自己的文本拿去跑“海明威测试”，由此讨论风格规则能否衡量文学。值得写作者读，因为它暴露了风格检查器的边界——启发式规则能提示常见问题，却会把刻意破格的文学判为错误；也提醒我们，工具命名会塑造用户预期。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把风格检查器当“初筛”而非“裁判”：它能提示长句、副词、被动等常见问题，但不能判断文学效果。
- 02
文学写作常故意违反规则；如果你的目标是艺术表达，不要让工具替你决定句子该不该改。
- 03
工具和产品命名会设定预期：叫“海明威”就会让人拿文学作品来测，写作者也要警惕标签对判断的暗示。
- 04
有评论者认为海明威被高估、狄更斯式的繁复才见功力，说明风格偏好没有统一标准；写作时先明确自己想达到的效果。
HN 评论精选
风格检查器是启发式工具，不应被用来评判文学；命名造成误用，规则也需更精细的语言分析。
我从这件事得到的教训是：向用户传达基于启发式的行为非常难。讽刺的是，漂亮的名字“Hemingway”让人把文学作品粘贴进风格检查器！你甚至雇不到一个合格的人来给你有意义的风格反馈。写小说的人不该想要这种东西，这很愚蠢；它不是用来写小说的。语言艺术总会打破所有规则、反转预期。这就像用视觉设计启发式去检查绘画或艺术摄影——不出所料，它们会违反你的设计规则！把应用叫“Hemingway”给它做了很好的品牌，也带来参与度……不幸的是，这种参与度全是在拿它从来不该做的事来抨击它。我认为风格检查有很大潜力，这是一个探索不足的领域。而且这个 alpha 版实现的规则可能还不够好；至少要用词性标注器，最好再加句法分析器，才能给出更好的反馈。只要启发式与常见风格问题相关，你就能从应用中得到一些用处。但显然，这件事很难讲清楚。
syllogism查看英文原文
What I take away from this is: communicating heuristic-based behaviour to users is damn hard. The irony here is that the beautiful name, "Hemmingway", leads people to paste bloody _literature_ into a style linter! You wouldn't even be able to hire an unqualified human to give you meaningful style feedback. Nobody writing a novel should want this sort of thing. That's stupid. It's not for writing a novel. Verbal art is always going to break all the rules and invert expectations. This would be like checking visual design heuristics against paintings or art photographs. Surprise surprise, they break your design rules! Calling the app "Hemmingway" brands the app beautifully, and gets people engaged...unfortunately the engagement is jumping all over it for something it was never supposed to do. I think there's good potential for style linting, it's a really under-explored area. And I think probably the app's rules, as implemented in this alpha, aren't that much up to scratch. You'd at least want to run a POS tagger, and probably a parser, to give better feedback. So long as the heuristics are _correlated_ with common style problems, you can get some use out of the app. But apparently that's a difficult story to tell.
强烈反对海明威式简洁，认为狄更斯式繁复语言更见功力，说明风格好坏是主观判断。
为什么人们想模仿海明威的风格？他是个糟糕的作家。高中时我该读《永别了，武器》，却受不了他的文风，没能读完。如果他的作品不是印装成书，我会以为那是业余爱好者的涂鸦——也许是没进 AP 英语班的学生写的，因为文笔中下到差。另一方面，狄更斯是语言大师——写长而复杂的句子，充满描写和类比，形容词副词丰富多样，文笔有描述性又机智。我一直不懂人们为什么喜欢海明威。
csense查看英文原文
Why do people want to emulate Hemingway's style? He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school. If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quality was kinda mediocre-to-poor. Dickens, OTOH, is a master of language -- creating long and complex sentences, filled of description and analogy, which have a rich diversity of adjectives and adverbs, creating a descriptive, witty prose. I've never understood why people like Hemingway.
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