Hemingway Editor Review:
based on real mystery shopping

Quick Overview

Hemingway Editor is a useful platform for improving readability and fixing grammar, punctuation, and spelling, though it doesn’t necessarily grade essays. It identifies weak language and offers AI-driven suggestions for enhancement. While Hemingway Editor excels in making text clearer, its scoring system can be confusing, as readability scores do not always reflect the quality of the writing. Overall, it functions better as an online proofreader than a comprehensive essay checker, which is reflected by its A*Help score of just 52/100 pts.

If you ever came across the recommendation to use Hemingway Editor and wondered “What is Hemingway Editor” at all, then buckle up as our AHelp team is going to tell you everything about it.

This is an AI-powered tool designed to help anyone make their writing better. The platform combines a few solutions in one place: grammar fixer, rewriter, and, most interestingly, essay checker. The last feature was the one that caught our eye: with its help, the Hemingway Editor promised to help us make our writing “concise and correct” as well as provide the grade for the checked piece. We just couldn’t skip the opportunity to see whether the service could be used as a paper evaluator, so we decided to carry out a special mystery shopping project to test it out.

Hemingway Editor Review: Mystery Shopping Experience

To test out Hemingway Editor’s essay grading capabilities, we put it through a special testing process, evaluating the three main criteria: grading quality, value for money, and overall experience.

The main thing we wanted to find out was how well can the service assess writing. To check that out we run two essays on the same topic through the tool. The first one was badly written: it had problems with structure and transition words, as well as grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. The second one, on the other hand, was a well-written text that had proper paragraph organization, logical transitions, organized citations, and no grammatical errors. After grading them using Hemingway, we compared the analysis with the actual indicators of both papers which made up the Grading Quality score.

Additionally, to check out the value-for-money aspect, we looked at the pricing policies, free-use opportunities, grading form flexibility, and the criteria offered to be evaluated. When assessing the overall experience, our team mostly paid attention to the convenience of the service and its ease of use.

Having put together all three scores, we graded (ironically) Hemingway Editor with an A*Help score, representing its usefulness and quality as an essay-checking service. Let’s look closely at what we found out about this platform.

Hemingway Editor: Grading Quality  — 20/60 ⭐️⭐️

So, let’s spill the tea on whether Hemingway Editor is really a good platform to use for checking your essays. And, to be frank, Hemingway Editor wasn’t perfect when it came to essay grading at all.

It did help with improving the texts’ writing to make them more clear. For example, there were suggestions as to how we could improve hard-to-read sentences and weak vocabulary. It also gave us the option to choose the specification for our text as a technical one, so that readability would be assessed accordingly. Nonetheless, when assessing the well-written essay, a lot of sentences still got marked as ‘hard to read’, despite having a typical structure and wording for an academic piece.

The scoring system confused us a lot too, as the bad essay was graded with 7 points and marked as “good”, while the well-written paper received a score of 16 and an “ok” comment. It didn’t look like the adjustments we made when specifying the purpose of the writing had any influence on the result. There was also no general score or feedback as to the content of the writing. 

So, according to our Hemingway Editor review, this service has more functionality to be an online proofreader rather than an essay checker. So we can’t suggest you use it to see which grade your paper can get.

👍Well-Written Essay		👎Poorly-Written Essay
16 “Ok”	Given Grade	7 “Good”
Okay	General feedback with strong/weak points	Okay
Doesn’t check	Essay structure	Doesn’t check
Doesn’t check	Topic focus	Doesn’t check
Not great	Cohesiveness	Not great
Fine	Spelling and Grammar	Perfect
Doesn’t check	Citations	Doesn’t check

Hemingway Editor: Value for Money — 14/20 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Since Hemingway is a largely recommended platform to help with writing improvement, we decided to look closely at what it offers to evaluate. 

Let us tell you, the service surely looks like the right platform to do the essay checking. However, it is important to note from the start that here you won’t receive a grade for your work. This service was designed rather to analyze and improve readability, as well as fix grammar, punctuation, and spelling along the way. However, it won’t help make your arguments stronger or keep your content on track with the discussed topic. We can give a few bonus points to Hemingway as it also identifies weak language and gives an opportunity to make the text better with AI.

If you still want to check out the service for yourself, a great plus is that you can do it for free during a 14-day trial. After that though, you will have to pick one of the monthly plans, that start at $10/month.

In general, though, we wouldn’t say that this platform offers any extra valuable assistance, not at essay grading at least.

Hemingway Editor: Overall Experience — 18/20 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Another important aspect to consider when choosing a platform for grading essays, is usability and convenience. 

In this field, we can confirm that working with Hemingway Editor is pretty straightforward. You can either register to get a free trial or use it as is without registration and a few limitations. We decided to go for a free trial to get the full experience. Unfortunately, we saw no grading form, as expected, but just a field where we could paste a text to get it analyzed. Yet, on the bright side, the opportunity to both upload and export the text made the work process much easier. An extra great addition was the desktop app that allowed for a more streamlined writing assessment too.

Overall, Hemingway presented us with a pleasant user experience, with nothing, except for a special grading form, that we would want to add to the platform.  

Conclusion

At the end of the day, in case you are looking for a service to evaluate your writing, Hemingway Editor is not for you. It can be a good companion to those who want to improve the flow of their texts and correct any possible issues with wording or grammar.  Otherwise, it won’t give you any suggestions as to how the content of your paper could be improved. So, think about what you are looking for to assess in your essays. If you need to get at least an approximate grade for your work, check out some other services aside from Hemingway.

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