An app to help you write like Hemingway

Online and mobile applications enhance so many processes. Why not let one sculpt your prose to conform to Papa’s style? Plus, procrastinating writers, the CIA’s hand in MFAs, and more.

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Writers who don’t produce copy—or leave it so long that they couldn’t possibly produce something good—are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding.

This is what psychologists call “self-handicapping” and McArdle theorizes that it’s an outgrowth of an American education system in which kids who are good in English—i.e., future writers—are taught with written passages that are nearly perfect, so they fear falling short of those lofty standards:

Unfortunately, in your own work, you are confronted with every clunky paragraph, every labored metaphor and unending story that refuses to come to a point. “The reason we struggle with “insecurity,” says Pastor Steven Furtick, “is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”

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