Write Like Hemingway: AI Prose Critique

Six of Hemingway's actual craft principles, applied to your draft as an editing framework.

“Write like Hemingway” usually gets reduced to one instruction: use short sentences. That is the least interesting thing about how he actually worked, and following it alone produces prose that is clipped without being strong.

This critique applies six of Hemingway’s real, documented principles as an analytical framework — and it deliberately does not impersonate him. There is no pastiche, no gruff voice performance. It reads your draft the way an editor working from his craft rules would.

The framework covers the Iceberg Theory, where over-explaining a character’s backstory brings the submerged weight of a story to the surface and dissipates it; the Kansas City Star style sheet Hemingway credited as his foundation, which targets passive voice and hesitant phrasing; the principle that prose is architecture rather than interior decoration, which flags adjectives and adverbs propping up weak verbs; the sequence of motion and fact, which replaces named emotions with the physical detail that produced them; the “shock-proof crap detector” that catches posturing and forced sentiment; and a distrust of abstraction in favour of the tangible and specific.

How to use this critique

  1. Paste a passage of your own prose into the text field below.
  2. Click Copy full prompt to clipboard — you get the critique framework and your text together, in one block.
  3. Paste that into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another LLM.

Each issue comes back quoted, explained through the relevant principle, and revised. The feedback is blunt by design — but it credits what already works rather than inventing faults to seem rigorous.

If you want a related pass focused purely on verbs, try the strong verbs checker; for named emotions specifically, the show, don’t tell checker goes deeper.

Analyze the following prose the way Ernest Hemingway would critique a student's work in a creative writing workshop. Don't impersonate Hemingway. Instead, apply his actual craft principles listed below as a rigorous analytical framework. 1. The Iceberg Theory (The Theory of Omission). A writer should only show the top one-eighth of the story; the remaining seven-eighths must remain underwater, felt but unseen. Hemingway explains: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." Flag over-explanation. If you are explaining a character's backstory or inner trauma directly to the reader, you are bringing the iceberg out of the water and losing its massive, submerged weight. 2. The Star Copy Style (Vigorous English). Before he was a novelist, Hemingway was a reporter for the Kansas City Star, and he credited their style sheet as his foundational education. The rules were absolute: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Flag passive voice, clunky multi-clause sentences, and hesitant phrasing ("It seemed like," "She sort of"). Replace them with active, muscular verbs and direct statements. 3. Architecture, Not Interior Decoration. Prose must be structurally sound and free of ornamental fluff. "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over." Flag adjectives and adverbs. Scour your draft for words that describe how a thing happened (e.g., "he ran quickly," "she smiled beautifully") and replace them with stronger nouns and verbs that render the modifier obsolete. 4. The Sequence of Motion and Fact (Objective Correlative). To convey an emotion, do not name the emotion. Instead, describe the exact physical action or sensory detail that produced the emotion. Hemingway wrote about the struggle to capture "the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion." Flag words like "sad," "terrified," "joyful". Let the precise physical facts generate the emotion in the reader. 5. The Shock-Proof Crap Detector. A writer's most essential tool is ruthless self-honesty. Hemingway stated, "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof crap detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it." Flag moments of posturing, fake intellect, forced sentimentality, or writing that is trying too hard to sound "literary." If it rings false to you, it will ring false to the reader. Cut it. 6. Distrust Abstractions. Grand, conceptual words lose their meaning in the face of brutal reality. Flag lofty philosophical terms. Ground the narrative in the physical, the tangible, and the specific. For each issue found, quote the specific passage, explain the problem through the lens of the relevant Hemingway principle, and offer a revised version. Be direct. No encouragement for its own sake — but give full credit where something works.

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