Hemingway Editor: An ELA Teacher's Best Friend

As Michigan experiences another school closure due to the pandemic, many teachers are starting to feel like public education will soon mirror the school system in Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. And, while we may not have the resources available to create VR classrooms and avatars for our students to work from home, it is impossible to deny that education has become increasingly dependent on technology. As teachers try to get creative to create meaningful lessons with online tools, we should be encouraging our students to embrace the digital world, too. One way to do this is with one of my favorite websites: Hemingway Editor. 

This website allows you to type or paste in a text, and it will check your paper and provide corrects. But this is not your mother's handheld spell-checker--Hemingway Editor does much more. It shows you where you used a passive voice, where you included adverbs, if a sentence has a simpler alternative, and if a sentence is lengthy or difficult to read. It labels each correction with various color highlights and even provides you with a readability score and grade level! 

This website is a grade saver, so why would we not teach our students to utilize it? Many students, though they are surely tech-savvy, do not realize that they can make the process of editing their papers and assignments a hundred times easier by simply copying and pasting them into a website. I encourage ELA teachers to inform their students about this website to help them improve their papers and further their learning experience with editing and identifying grammatical mistakes (not to mention, it makes teachers' job of grading a little bit easier😁). According to a review of the Hemingway Editor on ReedsyBlog, "working with the Hemingway Editor for an extended period would likely train you to spot [...] mistakes as you’re writing." 

In the new world of online learning, teachers should help guide their students to make the most of technology and digital education. Showing students websites and other tips that can make their independent learning a little less challenging is crucial to helping us all thrive in these unforeseen circumstances.