A $5K proposal walked away from you last quarter. The rejection email said “we went with someone whose proposal was clearer.” Your work wasn’t worse. Your sentences were. The executive summary read at grade 14.
Decision-makers comparing four proposals in a tab-switching session between meetings don’t pick the best freelancer. They pick the one they can finish reading. Hemingway Editor catches the sentences that lose you the work before the client reaches your price.
Hemingway Editor Isn’t a Grammar Tool. That’s Why It Works.
Hemingway Editor is a free web tool at hemingwayapp.com that highlights hard-to-read sentences and gives your writing a grade-level score. Paste text. See the problems in three seconds.
The colors do the work. Yellow means hard to read. Red means very hard. Purple flags passive voice. Blue catches adverbs. Green suggests a simpler phrase where you’ve over-engineered one.
What it doesn’t do: check grammar. Check spelling. Edit inside your email or your docs. You paste in, you fix, you paste back. That’s the whole loop.
The limitation is the point. Hemingway answers one question — is this readable? — and answers it instantly. It isn’t trying to be Grammarly. It catches the sentences clients won’t bother to finish.
That distinction matters when you’re deciding which writing tool to pay for. Grammarly catches the typo that makes you look careless. Hemingway catches the sentence that makes the client put your proposal down. Different jobs. Both belong in the workflow.
So why does readability matter more for freelancers than for anyone else writing on the internet?
Why Readability Is a Revenue Lever, Not a Writing Nicety
Decision-makers reading proposals aren’t readers. They’re scanners. They’re evaluating three to five freelancers in a tab-switching session between meetings, looking for the one they can assess fastest.
Grade-8 writing gets read to the end. Grade-12+ writing gets skimmed. Skimmed proposals lose — not because the work is worse, but because the client missed the value proposition and defaulted to whichever price they remembered.
Run the math. If a 5-minute Hemingway pass lifts your close rate by 5% on $3,000 projects, that’s $150 extra per won project. The tool is free. ROI math doesn’t get cleaner than that.
This isn’t about dumbing down your writing. It’s about removing the friction between your expertise and the client’s understanding. Different thing entirely.
Honest caveat: if you write proposals for technical buyers — engineers, scientists, doctors — grade 10-11 is fine. They expect density. Everyone else: grade 7-8. The lower you go, the harder your value proposition lands.
Sold on the why? Then which parts of the proposal actually need the pass — and what grade should you target?
The 3 Proposal Sections to Run Through Hemingway (and the Grade to Target)
Not every word needs a readability pass. These three do.
| Section | Target grade | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Executive summary | 7-8 | The section the decision-maker actually reads in full |
| Scope of work | 7-8 | Where “I thought that was included” disputes start |
| Pricing & CTA | 6-7 | Zero ambiguity required to get a yes |
Case studies and long-form deliverables: grade 8-9. Client emails: grade 6-7. The rest of the proposal — the parts no one reads twice — don’t waste the time.
Executive Summary: Grade 7-8
This is the only section many decision-makers read in full before deciding whether to keep going. If it’s grade 12+, they skim, miss your positioning, and bucket you with the other three proposals as “roughly the same — go with cheapest.”
Run the executive summary through Hemingway first. Cut every yellow sentence in half. Rewrite every red one. If a sentence has two ideas, make it two sentences. The grade level drops two points just from breaking compound sentences.
A good proposal template sets this up — your executive summary should already be three to five short paragraphs. Hemingway just makes sure each one reads.
Scope of Work: Grade 7-8
This is where misunderstandings start. The compound sentences Hemingway highlights are exactly the ones clients misread later. “We will design and develop a responsive marketing website including up to five core pages, integrate it with your existing CRM, and provide three rounds of revisions following initial delivery” reads at grade 14 — and the client will swear “responsive” wasn’t agreed.
Where yellow and red highlights cluster, convert the prose to a bulleted list. Each line, one deliverable, one verb. Disputes drop, scope creep drops, your margin holds.
Pricing & CTA: Grade 6-7
The section where the client needs zero ambiguity to say yes. Passive voice and adverbs here read as hedging.
“We would be happy to potentially begin work upon receipt of a signed agreement and initial deposit” is a no. “We start Monday after the deposit clears” is a yes. Same information. Different close rate.
If Hemingway flags anything in this section, fix it. Don’t argue with it.
Before and After: The Grade-14 Sentence That Lost vs the Grade-7 Version That Won
Before (grade 14): “Our methodology leverages a comprehensive multi-phase engagement framework that has been demonstrated to substantially improve conversion metrics across diverse client verticals.”
After (grade 7): “We run a three-phase process. It’s lifted conversions for clients in SaaS, e-commerce, and B2B services.”
Same information. Half the words. The client reads the second one. The first one gets parsed as noise, the eye jumps to the price, and the proposal closes — for someone else.
That’s one sentence. A 1,200-word proposal has fifty of them.
Now — how does this fit into a real workflow without adding an hour to every send?
The 4-Step Workflow (and Whether the $20 Desktop App Is Worth It)
The workflow that doesn’t slow you down:
- Draft the proposal in your usual tool — doc, Notion, or AI-assisted with ChatGPT.
- Paste the executive summary, scope, and pricing into hemingwayapp.com.
- Cut every yellow and red sentence. Reword passives. Drop the adverbs.
- Run through Grammarly for grammar and spelling. Send.
Total added time on a 1,200-word proposal: five to eight minutes. The ROI math from earlier covers this a hundred times over.
The free web version is genuinely all most freelancers need. Same editor as the desktop app. No account. No usage limit.
The desktop app is $19.99 once. Worth it if you write proposals offline (flights, trains), want local document saving, or publish case studies directly to WordPress or Medium. For everyone else, the web version is enough.
If you’ve already built a snippet library, TextExpander snippets plug into this workflow cleanly — run each snippet through Hemingway once when you write it, then assemble proposals from pre-vetted blocks.
The honest limitation: Hemingway doesn’t integrate with email, Google Docs, or anything else. You paste, edit, paste back. It’s a 30-second annoyance for a 5%-close-rate gain. Take the trade.
One last thing — the takeaway worth remembering.
The Bottom Line
You don’t lose proposals because your work is worse. You lose them because the client gave up reading before they reached your price.
Hemingway Editor fixes that in five minutes, for free.
The test: go to hemingwayapp.com right now, paste in the executive summary of your last sent proposal, and check the grade level. If it’s above 8, you now know why some of those didn’t close.
The template that pairs with this readability workflow is the freelance proposal template — a well-structured starting point that’s been through the same pass. It’s the unfair advantage that takes a Tuesday afternoon to build.