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Proselint

proselint.com

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Re: Proselint

#21

Post by gsabo »

vpontis wrote: post #5

Can someone who has tried this share their experience? It sounds really awesome but it's very hard to tell if it's going to be more annoying or more useful. Maybe it would be useful to have some example linting errors on the homepage. Either way, I really love the idea!

I ran some of my recent emails through it. It picked up my overuse of exclamation marks and my use of "all of the time" instead of "all the time." It definitely doesn't seem to sensitive - I would lint all of my emails with it if it were easy to do so.

Re: Proselint

#22

Post by steventhedev »

squimmy wrote: post #10

I 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 .

I'd love to have something like this for day to day work emails. They aren't beautiful prose, and they shouldn't be.

That said, I think there's a better way to approach this. Rather than linting based on a list of rules, I'd prefer a more technical approach that highlighted actual issues, such as garden path sentences, ambiguous pronouns, doubled words, etc.

Re: Proselint

#23

Post by sdrothrock »

rosser wrote: post #14

I 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 i…

> I have some wariness that its widespread use could actually have a shaping, and, specifically homogenizing, effect on language.

This could be a benefit in industries where the goal is to have homogenous writing that meets a given set of specifications/standards. Some ideas:

1. Peer-reviewed scientific writing and/or abstracts

2. Manuals

3. Materials written for a subset of language (EFL, pidgin, children's books)

4. Documentation

Re: Proselint

#24

Post by [deleted] »

dcw303 wrote: post #7

This sounds promising, but I think a lot of potential users would be deterred by the lack of examples. This positively screams for a online interface to test drive.

[deleted]

Re: Proselint

#25

Post by squimmy »

abvdasker wrote: post #20
squimmy wrote: post #10

I 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 li…

You're right there.

My impression of this might have been different if the list of rules included CMOS instead of something that tells me not to use the term "jump the gun" because it's a cliche.

Re: Proselint

#27

Post by suchow »

yitchelle wrote: post #26

Can someone explain in layman's terms how this is any better from an app like the Hemmingway Editor [0]? Both analyses the text and makes suggestions to make it better. [0]- http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

See our discussion of this at http://proselint.com/approach/. I'll note that we do not consider Proselint a complete product — it's in its earliest stages, perhaps at 2% of its final capacity. That number has steadily decreased as we learn more, which we take to be a good sign.

Re: Proselint

#28

Post by suchow »

segphault wrote: post #15

The 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 NSLinguistic​Tagger and related APIs. After tes…

You're right, but the problem is much worse than that. Examining 200 entries from Garner's Modern American Usage at random reveals that half of them are easy to implement, the kind of thing that could be assigned as a homework problem (e.g., recognizing that “$10 USD” is redundant, that “very unique” is comparing an uncomparable adjective, or that people from Michigan are called “Michiganders”, not “Michiganites”). Thirty percent are moderately challenging, requiring a week’s effort. Fifteen percent are hard — they are entire projects, requiring advances in AI. And the remaining advice (around five percent), the best kind, is AI-complete. Consider, e.g., "John hit Peter only in the nose". Does this mean that, of all Peter's body parts that could have been hit, John hit only Peter's nose? Or is it a grammatical error that was suppose to convey that, of all the people John could have hit, it was only Peter who he did hit.

We're interested in incorporating deeper NLP. In particular, we've been eyeing https://github.com/spacy-io/spaCy.

Re: Proselint

#29

Post by suchow »

chei0aiV wrote: post #19
jake-low wrote: post #4

I'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.

We are. Even so, opening issues on Github and submitting PRs is appreciated.

Re: Proselint

#30

Post by jcoffland »

It would be interesting to run this against campaign speeches as a unbiased way of judging the quality of prose. Surely content is more important but still it would be fun.
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