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You've finished a draft. You know it needs work. So you open up Hemingway Editor, paste in a chapter, and spend an hour cutting adverbs, trimming long sentences, and bringing the grade level down.
The chapter reads more cleanly. But when you step back, the problem is still there. The scene still drags. The character's motivation still feels thin. The pacing still goes flat in the middle.
Hemingway Editor did exactly what it was supposed to do. The issue is that you used a polishing tool to fix a structural problem, and no amount of sentence-level cleanup is going to solve that.
That's the mistake a lot of writers make when comparing editing tools like Hemingway editor, the popular (mostly-free) style-checker, and Twig, the virtual dev editor.
They assume editing is one thing when it has always been two.
The Two Types of Editing (And Why They Matter)
Most writers think of editing as one thing. You finish your draft, you edit it, you're done. Tools like Hemingway Editor were built for exactly that idea, a final polish before publishing.
But editing is actually two very different jobs, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes writers make when they revise.
Structural editing (also called developmental editing) asks the big questions: Does the story work? Are the characters compelling? Is the pacing holding a reader's attention? Or for nonfiction, are the ideas and facts ordered in such a way as to be convincing and transformative. This is the work you do before you fix a single comma-splice.
Line editing and proofreading asks the small questions: Is this sentence too long? Am I using passive voice? Is this word doing its job? Am I correctly using the Oxford-comma (because the Oxford comma is always correct, right)?
You don't want to do these in the wrong order. Polishing sentences you're going to cut is a waste of time.
That's exactly why Hemingway Editor and Twig are so different. Hemingway Editor is a polish-phase tool. Twig is a structural revision tool. They don't compete: they serve opposite ends of the editing process.
Here's what each one actually does, and how to figure out which one you need right now.
What Hemingway Editor Does
Hemingway Editor is a readability and style tool designed to make your prose cleaner and clearer. It doesn't care about your story structure, your character arcs, or whether your plot holds together. It cares about your sentences.
The app takes its name from Ernest Hemingway, whose famously minimalist writing style treated adverbs as a sign of weakness. (Worth noting: Hemingway himself used adverbs all the time, so as always, don't take any editorial advice blindly.)
Paste or type your writing into the app and it highlights problem areas using a color-coded system.
- Yellow marks sentences that are hard to read.
- Red marks sentences that are very hard to read (consider splitting them).
- Blue flags adverbs (usually, but not always, safe to cut).
- Green flags passive voice.
- Purple flags words with simpler alternatives.
It also shows you a readability grade level and a word count. The goal is to push your grade level down, toward clear, direct prose that reads fast and doesn't trip up your reader.
Hemingway Editor Plus, the paid subscription tier, adds AI-powered features: an advanced grammar checker and the ability to rewrite wordy sentences or shift their tone.
It's a tool for the final polish phase of writing, not revision. It doesn't read your manuscript as a whole. It reads your sentences one at a time. If you're a fiction writer who tends toward complex, dense prose, Hemingway Editor is a useful gut-check at the line level.
Check out Hemingway Editor here »
What Twig Does
Twig is an AI-powered developmental editing tool designed specifically for authors working on full-length manuscripts: novels, memoirs, nonfiction books, and short stories.
Where Hemingway Editor looks at your sentences, Twig looks at your entire book. It analyzes your completed manuscript to give big-picture feedback: the same kind of feedback you'd typically get from a human developmental editor.
Within approximately 30 minutes of uploading your manuscript, Twig gives you:
- An Editorial Letter offering comprehensive feedback with issues prioritized as Critical, Important, or Minor
- A Revision Plan with specific, actionable steps to get your book publish-ready
- Chapter-by-Chapter Notes analyzing each section individually
- up to 27 specialized analyses covering everything from voice consistency to stakes escalation to subplot integration
Twig performs multiple detailed passes on your manuscript before ever delivering feedback. Think of it as an editor reading your book 20+ times, each time with a specific lens: plot structure, pacing, character arc, dialogue, theme, and more.
Each type of book gets a different set of analyses, so it treats a cozy mystery differently than a memoir or a nonfiction how-to.
How I Use Hemingway Editor and Twig
I've written over 20 books professionally since 2010, have received 6-figure advances for myself and my co-writers on several of them, and have used Hemingway Editor for exactly 0 of them. Personally, I don't need a style-checker. My writing style was forged by the heat of thousands of hours of failed drafts and banging my head against the keyboard (you know, the old fashioned way).
That being said, I've been reviewing writing tools for more than a decade, and I've always been moderately impressed by Hemingway. Writers often do need to simplify their writing and to write in a clearer, more direct way.
Still, I find it funny that if you actually put Hemingway's own writing into the Hemingway editor, it often fails the test!
Which is all to say, Hemingway can be helpful if used judiciously and double-checking its output. In the end, you need to be confident in your writing, and an automated tool can only give you feedback, not do your writing for you.
That's one reason why I like Twig so much. At Twig, we're very up front that this tool is meant to give you feedback, NOT do your writing for you (as some AI tools promise).
And there is valuable feedback that AI can give you, especially when you consider it has been trained on millions of the best books in the world.
So I use Twig to help me quickly figure out some of the first, best structural edits I need to make in my books.
Do I trust it blindly? Of course not, but I don't even trust my editors blindly.
Is it helpful? Absolutely. I've received feedback that could significantly improve my manuscripts in just a few short hours, sometimes even clearer and more helpful than a human editor, and all for a fraction of the cost and time.
Side-by-Side Comparison
Here's how they stack up.
Hemingway Editor helps you edit your sentences:
- for the final polish phase
- a line editing and style tool
- outputs color-coded sentence highlights
- free (desktop version is$19.99, Plus starts at$10/mo)
Twig edits your entire manuscript.
- use Twig right after your first draft
- a developmental editing tool
- outputs a 40+ page editorial report.
- 0.3¢ per word, one time, no subscription
Neither tool writes prose for you.
The core difference: Hemingway Editor makes your sentences better. Twig tells you whether your book works as a whole (and how to fix it).
Hemingway Editor Pricing
Hemingway Editor has a generous free tier. The web app at hemingwayapp.com is completely free and includes all the core editing features: color-coded highlights, grade level scoring, and readability analysis.
If you want to work offline, the desktop app is a one-time purchase of $19.99.
Hemingway Editor Plus, the subscription tier with AI features, runs $10/month or $100/year ($8.33/month). Higher tiers are available for heavier AI usage: $25/month for 5,000 AI sentence rewrites, and $30/month for 10,000.
For most writers, the free version covers everything they need from Hemingway Editor.
Check out Hemingway Editor here »
Twig Pricing
Twig uses per-manuscript pricing rather than a subscription. You pay when you need an edit, not every month.
Pricing is based on word count: around $150 for a 50,000-word manuscript. For context, a human developmental editor typically charges $1,000-$3,000 for the same manuscript, and turnaround is often weeks. Twig delivers in approximately 30 minutes.
There's no ongoing subscription, no monthly fee, and no credits to track. If you're revising heavily and running multiple drafts through, the per-edit cost can add up, but for most authors going through one or two revision cycles, it's significantly cheaper than any human alternative.
Which One Should You Use?
Hemingway and Twig actually fit together naturally because they don't overlap at all.
The order matters though. Use Twig first, after your first draft is done. Get the structural feedback, work through the Revision Plan, and fix the big problems: plot, character, pacing. Do that work before you touch your sentences.
Then, once the structure is solid and you're in the final polish phase, run your chapters through Hemingway Editor. At that point you know the scenes you're polishing are actually staying in the book.
Doing it the other way around, polishing first and then restructuring, means you'll be rewriting clean sentences you end up cutting anyway. That's a frustrating way to spend your revision time.
Now, Go Get Back to Editing!
Great writing is rewriting. This has always been true. But if you don't know what kind of rewriting you're doing, it can make the whole process a lot more painful than it has to be.
So when it comes to your book, ask yourself: are these structural problems, or prose and style problems?
If your draft has structural problems, start with Twig. Get the big picture feedback, fill your plot holes, cut those unnecessary scenes, and fix what's actually broken. Try Twig here »
Then, when the book works structurally, bring in Hemingway Editor to clean up the prose.
Alternatively, you could just bang your head against the keyboard a few more times. That works too!
Happy rewriting!
Which phase are you in right now: structural revision or final polish? I'd love to hear where you're at with your manuscript. Email me at joseph.bunting@twig.io.
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