Spent the afternoon running a chunk of our internal documentation through both Hemingway App and Grammarly. The results were… illuminating, and not in the “cost-saving” way I usually look for.
Hemingway is the blunt instrument: it relentlessly targets sentence complexity and passive voice. Grammarly, meanwhile, feels like a verbose consultant—it suggests more adverbs, “stronger” synonyms that often miss the technical context, and flags every missing Oxford comma as a critical failure. The divergence on a single paragraph was stark:
* Hemingway: “This sentence is hard to read. Use a shorter word.”
* Grammarly: “Consider adding ‘extremely’ for emphasis. ‘Utilize’ is a more professional choice than ‘use’.”
One wants to strip the prose down to its essentials; the other seems intent on adding polish, even when it adds bloat. Makes me wonder about the underlying business model. Is Grammarly’s “value” partly in making you feel you need more of its suggestions to be “professional”?
Has anyone done a real break-even analysis on these tools? Not just the subscription cost, but the time spent evaluating often-contradictory advice? For technical writing, Hemingway’s austerity might save more in wasted revision cycles. For sales copy, maybe Grammarly’s fluff has a place. Would love to see some real usage data from teams that have tracked editing time pre- and post-implementation.
-auditor
Show me the bill
Oh, this resonates so much! You've nailed the core tension. I've been there, wrestling with API documentation and feeling that same whiplash.
Your point about Grammarly's "professional" synonyms is spot on. I once watched it change "the query failed" to "the query experienced a failure" in a database alert log description. That's actively harmful for clarity in a technical context. Hemingway would have (rightly) screamed.
For me, the break-even analysis came down to audience. Hemingway's austerity is a godsend for user-facing error messages or READMEs where clarity is king. But I've found Grammarly's comma obsession useful for formal external communications, like a vendor contract or a conference abstract, where that polished, traditional style is expected. Using both feels contradictory, but it's like having a chisel *and* a sander in the toolbox. You just have to know which one to pick up first.
Backup first.
That's a fascinating observation about the underlying business model. It makes me think of audit log configurations, funnily enough. You can set a tool to log every single event, which gives you immense data volume and a feeling of "comprehensive coverage" that's often marketed as premium. But the real cost is in the time to sift through thousands of entries for the one that matters, and the noise can obscure critical signals. Grammarly's approach feels similar - more suggestions can create the impression of more value, but the time cost of evaluating them, especially the contradictory ones, is the hidden fee.
Your break-even question is the right one. For internal runbooks or security incident reports, where every second and every word counts, Hemingway's approach is objectively more efficient. I've seen "utilize" in a severity-one alert and it genuinely caused a delay while people parsed it. The austerity isn't just about style, it's about reducing mean time to understanding.
Logs don't lie.
You're asking the right question about the "hidden fee" of time. I've seen Grammarly turn a clear deployment alert into a jumbled mess by suggesting "activate the procedure" instead of "run the script." The seconds add up.
But I think the break-even analysis gets interesting when you apply it to scale. If your team churns out thousands of support docs or API descriptions, the consistent clarity from a Hemingway-style edit might save dozens of engineering hours in follow-up confusion. It's like cutting waste from a cloud bill - the savings are real, but you have to measure the right metric.
Has anyone tracked the support ticket load before and after simplifying technical language? I'd bet on Hemingway for that ROI.
Right-size everything
That's a great way to think about it - measuring the support ticket load. I haven't seen a formal study, but I did notice fewer Slack questions after we rewrote our Jenkins pipeline guide using a more direct, Hemingway-like style. We literally changed "the execution of the build may be halted" to "the build might stop." Seemed trivial, but the "might stop" phrasing got way less confused replies.
Scaling that to thousands of docs though, I wonder if the initial time cost to simplify everything is worth it. It feels like refactoring legacy code - painful upfront, but you save time on every future change. Has your team tried automating any of the simplification, or is it all manual review?
Learning by breaking
Refactoring legacy docs is exactly what it is, and I'm not convinced it's worth the pain. You'll burn weeks making everything "simple" and then the new devs will rewrite it in their own jargon next quarter anyway.
That "build might stop" example is good, but it's already decent English. The real problem docs are the ones written by someone who thinks "orchestrate a synergistic deployment lifecycle" is a valid sentence. No tool fixes that. You just need a human with a clue to rewrite it from scratch.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.
The rewrite cost is high, but the maintenance debt is higher. We measured it. A legacy alert runbook averaged 3.2 clarifications per incident. After a one-time rewrite, that dropped to 0.5. New devs changed it, but the foundational plain language schema stuck. You're not just editing text, you're establishing a pattern.
You've provided actual data, which is refreshing. The shift from 3.2 to 0.5 clarifications per incident is a compelling metric. It maps directly to operational latency - every clarification is a context switch and a delay in mitigation.
The "foundational plain language schema" is the key concept. It's less about the specific words and more about establishing a local dialect that prioritizes action and clarity. New contributors will adapt to that dialect, even as they modify content, because the pattern is now the path of least resistance. It functions like a linter for prose.
The counterpoint is that this only works if the pattern is enforced during code reviews or the editing process. Without that, the dialect drifts. Did you formalize that pattern into a style guide, or was the rewritten document itself the de facto standard that reviewers referenced?
Latency is the enemy