Can I use this with latex?
Just tried it; you can. Seems like it strips markup characters so it should work well with most markup languages.
Proselint
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: Proselint
#12Nice idea.
Bug report — it told me I had too many exclamation marks in a Markdown file with a number of images in it.
Re: Proselint
#13Will this be used by automated content creators? For example, lots of articles on some of news websites (including wikipedia) are written by bots. So the bot would write an article, invoke proselint and correct, if required?
Re: Proselint
#14I can see a lot of value for this sort of tool, and might even play with it myself, for sake of evaluating whether or not to incorporate its suggestions into my writing. At the same time, however, I have some wariness that its widespread use could actually have a shaping, and, specifically homogenizing, effect on language. For me, a large part of the beauty of language is how facile it is, how judiciously breaking its rules can create a more artful and compelling means of expression than linted — if you will, "prosaic" — prose seems likely to offer.
Re: Proselint
#15The main problem with a tool like this it that it needs to understand sentence structure in order to find a lot of common anti-patterns. Without some natural language processing, it's just going to be able to scan for word usage and simple things that you can catch with a regex. You could probably build something a lot more sophisticated on top of something like Apple's NSLinguisticTagger and related APIs.
After testing this against a dozen of my blog posts, I'm not terribly impressed with the output. I get more immediate value out of MarkedApp's keyword drawer and word repetition visualization.
Re: Proselint
#16The main problem with a tool like this it that it needs to understand sentence structure in order to find a lot of common anti-patterns. Without some natural language processing, it's just going to be able to scan for word usage and simple things that you can catch with a regex. You could probably build something a lot more sophisticated on top of something like Apple's NSLinguisticTagger and related APIs. After tes…
Interesting that there's a NBSP in NSLinguisticTagger
Re: Proselint
#17Does anyone know about similar tool for scientific papers? Specifically to help non native English speakers to write high quality scientific papers?
Re: Proselint
#18The main problem with a tool like this it that it needs to understand sentence structure in order to find a lot of common anti-patterns. Without some natural language processing, it's just going to be able to scan for word usage and simple things that you can catch with a regex. You could probably build something a lot more sophisticated on top of something like Apple's NSLinguisticTagger and related APIs. After tes…
Also really cool that a library like NSLinguisticTagger is included in OSX.
Re: Proselint
#19I've been interested in linters and style checkers for English prose for a while, and I'm excited to try this out! To the author(s): Your website, as far as I could tell, doesn't tell me how to install it; I had to go to GitHub to realize it was pip-installable. You should consider adding that to the main page.
The authors probably aren't reading HN, best submit a PR.
Re: Proselint
#20I question how useful a tool like this is for a skilled writer. Prose isn't code. Many key elements of good writing are based around the idea of knowing the rules, and then carefully breaking them .
That really depends on the kind of writing. For things like journalism and technical writing there are rules that need to be followed and you're not allowed to color outside the lines very much. The really, really good writers learn to be creative within these more restrictive styles of writing. It's no coincidence that many great creative writers had copywriting jobs earlier in their careers.
I can imagine a tool like this making it much easier for journalists to follow a newspaper's style guide or something similar.