I write a lot. If you're reading this, I bet you do too. Writer is a broad term. There are lots of types. I’m a marketer and my cup of tea is short, powerful prose, aimed at persuading someone of something. Website copy. A launch post. An investor pitch. A company narrative. The kind of writing where a few sentences have to do a lot of work. In general, most of this type of writing in the wild is shit. Crapola. Just look around the internet. It's not hard to find bland, uninspired, generic copy. And AI? It’s made things worse, speeding up bad writing, and adding slop.
I built this writing app because I wanted a better place to do my type of writing.
The two sides of writing
Most people define a good writer by their mastery of the technical aspects of it: grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. That stuff is important, but it’s heavily overweighted when it comes to writing.
The other side of writing is the ideas. For example, I’d never consider myself a technically good writer. I’m sure you can find nits or outright errors in this post. What I’m good at is identifying abstract ideas, thinking about them deeply, then writing about them in a way that is accessible and easy to understand.
And that’s what matters. The technical side is honestly mostly solved now. Most editors catch mistakes as you type, and AI makes getting another pass on a draft easy.
Persuasively communicating ideas is where people need help. Is it a good idea? Is it clear? Does one thought lead naturally to the next? Is the writing easy to read? Have you given someone a reason to believe you?
A draft can be grammatically perfect and still fail at all of those things. Also, most reasonable people aren’t distracted by technically imperfect writing. They actually embrace it. The best writers often break or bend rules, purposefully or not, to create a unique writing style or “voice.”
If the writing is a hot mess, that’s a different story. But I’ve found the only people distracted by technically imperfect writing are the damaged pedantic souls who got yelled at by professors and let it shape them.
AI is attacking writing
It’s popular in tech circles for people to say things like “words matter” or “good writing is clear thinking.” It’s also popular to dump 350 words of AI-slop into strategy documents. Those words are technically perfect, usually coherent, but always soulless.
I use AI. It’s useful for getting started, exploring an idea, or reviewing a draft. But when the words matter, I want to stay involved in making them.
Writing IS thinking. Try to write persuasively about something you don’t deeply understand. It’s tough. My best writing always comes from the ideas I’ve been rolling around in my head for years.
That process matters when you’re asking an investor to believe in your business or a customer to reconsider how they work. There is magic in the process of forcing ideas you considered deeply into words designed for someone else to consume.
Is this just Hemingway App 2.0?
Kind of, yes. I’ve always loved Hemingway App. I’ve been using it weekly for years. Google Docs is cumbersome for my kind of writing, and an AI chat window is counterproductive to good writing.
Hemingway feels like a workbench. You put the draft down, pick up a tool, and work on it.
There’s something almost physical about it. Like a woodworker shaping a piece of wood, you keep adjusting the words until the thing takes shape.
Its focus on readability has also been valuable to me. I think many of us carry habits from academic writing into places where they don’t serve us. We build elaborate sentences, reach for formal language, and make readers work harder than they need to. Hemingway crushes that.
But I’ve always wanted more from Hemingway.
Some of that desire comes from my work on narrative design. Some comes from reading Sam Leith’s Words Like Loaded Pistols, which explores rhetoric and the long history of persuasion. It deepened my interest in Aristotle’s ideas about how an argument works.
So Aristotle, the app, is built around three lenses: clarity, flow, and persuasion.
Clarity helps you spot places where the language makes the reader work too hard. Long sentences, unnecessary wording, an actor hidden behind a passive construction. The goal is to make the thought easier to grasp.
Flow is about how the writing moves. The writing I love has cadence. One idea carries you into the next, and the rhythm feels like it belongs to the person who wrote it.
You can’t capture all of that in a number. But you can measure useful patterns: runs of similarly sized sentences, repeated openings, phrases that keep returning, or one paragraph carrying most of the draft. Aristotle surfaces those patterns so you can decide whether they’re helping. Sometimes repetition is exactly what makes a passage work.
Rhetoric is about persuasion. Does the reasoning hold together? Have you earned the reader’s trust? Have you made the stakes matter? Aristotle’s logos, ethos, and pathos give us a useful way to examine those questions, especially in B2B marketing, where so much of the work involves helping someone see a problem differently.
The app gives you a quiet place to write, then lets you switch into editing and examine specific passages through those three lenses. You make the changes yourself.
It’s early, and I’m building it around the way I like to work. You can find it in M3KA Labs.
Words are easy to generate now. I still want a place to spend time getting them right.