If you went to law school in the 1990s, you have probably seen the email forwards about outrageous examples of verbose, impenetrable sentences by lawyers. If you were a law student a generation later, then similar sentiments probably reached you in the form of memes. In other words, lawyers have a reputation for written communications that are no fun to read. When you write for prospective clients, such as on your law firm blog content, you will have to change your lawyerly writing style to something more engaging and direct. Is Hemingway App the answer?
What Is Hemingway App?
Like Grammarly and other free apps that alert writers to errors and stylistic breaches of etiquette in their writing, Hemingway App highlights words, phrases, and sentences that its algorithm thinks have a negative effect on the readability of your writing. These are Hemingway App’s pet peeves and the colors it uses to alert you to them:
· Confusing sentences – orange
· Excessively long sentences -pink
· Difficult words for which simpler alternatives exist – purple
· Passive voice – green
· Excessive adverbs – blue
You might notice that some of these so-called errors are subjective. If simple alternatives to technical legal terms exist, you probably use them during consultations with new clients or when telling anecdotes about your work at family gatherings. Hemingway App gives you a free pass on two uses of passive voice and two adverbs per blog post-length text.
There Is No Substitute for a Human Writer
Thanks to decades of technological developments, computers are getting better and better at writing texts that humans can understand, but you know better than a generic writing app does which words are synonyms in what context and which ones are in your audience’s active vocabulary. An app that objects to the word “exceptionally” because you used the words “surprisingly” and “somewhat” elsewhere in the same blog post could give you more frustration than help. You might be tempted to say, “If you’re so smart, you write my blog post, Papa Bot!”
You might find it helpful when the app highlights your sentences that it considers confusing. If anything, it may motivate you to write more than one draft of your blog posts. Of course, the app might also think that the second draft of your sentence is verbose, even if it is noticeably shorter than your first attempt. Some bots are never satisfied, no matter what you write.
If you think that writing multiple drafts of a blog post sounds time-consuming, you are right. Your job is to practice law, not to write sentences that are just the right length. An app can tell you whether you have used three adverbs in the same blog post, but a digital marketing expert can tell what makes your target audience take notice, and it is much more complex than just whether you use passive voice.
Law Blog Writers Writes for Human Beings, Not Just for Algorithms
Your law firm’s blog should show your uniqueness, not just avoid confusing sentences and excessive adverbs. Contact Law Blog Writers to get blog content that your writers will enjoy reading, regardless of the number of adverbs.
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