newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

Writing category

Monday, June 22, 2026

Learning to write on your own is good exercise for your mind

There’s a steep hill at the end of the block that goes through a park with a nice view of the city. It’s the equivalent of about six blocks long.

At one time, I would be huffing and puffing by the time I got to the top. If my wife was with me, I would jokingly tell her to leave me for dead.

But after a few months of taking on this hill multiple times a week, I was able to make it to the top with little change in my breath. I’m no spring chicken, so this was quite the accomplishment.

I tell this story because I believe that most people would agree that the more you exercise, the easier it gets. Or at least they believe this when it comes to their bodies. When it comes to their minds, though, that belief seems to fall by the wayside.

There is a new type of app that I’m seeing a lot of that uses AI to autocomplete your sentences. Not just a word or two, but entire sentences. Developers promise that these apps sound human and no one will ever know the difference.

Some examples are Cotypist, Cotabby and GhostPen. Thanks to vibe coding, there plenty of others being churned out.

Why are they so popular? I’m guessing they appeal to people who want to write faster. Instead of typing out the words, you can just hit tab and have the app to drop them in for you. They might also consider themselves to be poor writers and appreciate the app making them look a bit smarter.

So how does this relate to the hill at the end of the block?

Well, I suppose I would have bought an e-bike and got to the top a lot more easily. But what would I have accomplished? I would have been just as out of shape as ever. And I would have given up on self-reliance.

AI autocompletion apps encourage your mind to be dull and slow. The best way to get better at writing, as with anything in life, is to practise, practise, practise. Soon you’ll find you can express yourself clearly not only for others but also for your own well-being because you’re forced to organize your thoughts.

It gets easier and faster, just like it would with AI, but also something more. It becomes original. You’ll have the satisfaction of not just sounding like a human, but of sounding like the unique human that is you.

Space wars: Extra space, yes, but not necessarily two spaces

A couple of years ago, a study came out supporting the idea that two spaces after a period makes sentences easier to read. A great cheer went up from two-space supporters.

You can read about it in the Washington Post.

But it makes you wonder — where are these people even seeing two spaces?

Looking around the house, two spaces are nowhere to be found. Not in a letter from the bank that arrived this week, not in a textbook published in 2004, not in a novel published in 1983.

They are also nowhere to be found on the internet. Anything more than one space is stripped out by the web browser when it renders the code.

There are ways to ensure two spaces after a period, but they are laborious, and no one is going to pay a web developer to waste the time. A special bit of code would have to be inserted wherever you wanted the extra space.

Automated solutions would take a lot of time and effort to devise because of the difficulty in determining what constitutes the end of a sentence. Take this example:

Our hours are Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

There are four places that might be a period ending the sentence. You could write a program that made exceptions for a.m and p.m., but then you’re stuck with an infinitude of other abbreviations to account for.

The best solution would be for web browsers to have a built-in way of adding extra space after a period, although not necessarily two spaces. The amount of space would have to be balanced with all the other spacing in the context of the article.

Why is this best? Because not only does it recognizes that extra space indeed makes it easier to tell where one sentence ends and another begins. But it also because it recognizes that the concept of “spaces” that we learned from typewriter days is long gone.

Spacing has become a more subtle art, and should be measured that way.

The Internet needs an editor, and Hemingway is a good first step

Can an app really improve your writing? That’s the idea behind Hemingway — a sort of virtual editor now available online.

Language Log had a little fun with it by pointing out that Ernest Hemingway himself would have had a tough time satisfying the app.

So I tried running a few paragraphs from from newsonaut through the editor. Keeping an open mind, I was able to learn a few things.

Hemingway gives an evaluation of readability in terms of grade level. If someone with a Grade 7 education would find it easy to read, that’s good.

The app bases its judgment on five criteria. It doesn’t like sentences that are hard to read or, worse, very hard to read. How much harder than hard does a sentence have to be in ordered to be considered very hard? It’s all explained, but since the app is critical of adverbs, I have to wonder how it can tolerate the use of “very” — regarded by many as the most useless adjective of all.

It also advocates for simple phrases and limiting the passive voice.

In some cases, Hemingway liked my writing and in others it raised red flags. It wasn’t enough to make me want to make changes, but I did consider the criticism food for thought.

I would like to think of Hemingway as a solid first step toward something we need a lot more of on the Internet — editing. These days, anyone can publish. The downside is that many writers are publishing without the benefit of being edited. I’ve seen many long and complex articles by well-intentioned writers whose work might have received more attention if an editor had been allowed to give it a good massage.

Hemingway has a long way to go before it can take the place of a human editor, but it at least recognizes the importance of editing in a world where this function seems to have been forgotten.