I'm curious is this just a grammar checker? Or does it do spell checking too like aspell?
Proselint
31–40 of 141 posts
Re: Proselint
#32Microsoft Word had something like this round about 1999
Re: Proselint
#33The 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…
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”). T…
Furthering the complexity of this topic...
While "$10 USD" may be redundant in a newspaper published in the USA, it's immensely useful and arguably preferable when writing blog posts, emails and other text destined for the "World Wide" Web. While USD is commonly used as and many are comfortable with its use as a "common denominator" when pricing something on the Internet, it's still very important to be clear "what dollars do you mean" in this context.
Re: Proselint
#34This sounds interesting. As a bit of constructive criticism, please put some examples high up.
You tell me it does cool things. Great, show me. I've looked about on the various pages and can see only one example and I don't understand it:
text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared.
The tool is in a perfect place to show this off as it's text.
Re: Proselint
#35I'm curious is this just a grammar checker? Or does it do spell checking too like aspell?
No. Yes, and no. http://proselint.com/approach/
Re: Proselint
#36This sounds interesting. As a bit of constructive criticism, please put some examples high up. You tell me it does cool things. Great, show me. I've looked about on the various pages and can see only one example and I don't understand it: text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared. What's the context of this, what's the error it would have caught in my writing? The…
Good idea. If you run `proselint` without specifying a document, it'll run on the demo text, which you can also access here: https://gist.github.com/suchow/c7856f21128aee89ad55. Also, there's a live demo available at: http://proselint.com/write. It's been tested only on the latest version of Chrome, and I doubt it will handle the load here, but give it a try.
Re: Proselint
#37Are there any plans to support rules for texts written in other languages (e.g., German)? Would a set of such rules fit within the scope of this project or is proselint purposely or inherently limited to English prose? (@suchow)
Re: Proselint
#38If you're on Ubuntu, you want to run 'pip3 install proselint' rather than 'pip install proselint'.
I ran it on a couple 800 word emails and it didn't catch anything except me using 2 spaces instead of 1 in one place. I also ran it on my city's sidewalk maintenance ordinance, and it didn't report anything.
Re: Proselint
#39I 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 .
A linter doesn't prevent breaking its rules, it just notifies the writer of which rules are being broken.
I was writing some C earlier and my linter warned me about "incrementing a void pointer". However, I understood the context better than my linter, knew that I'd be compiling with gcc (which allows void pointer arithmetic), so I ignored the warning and carried on. My code compiled and ran nicely.
When it comes to static analysis, I think (creative) writers, like programmers, wouldn't care about warnings. This is already true of spell-checkers (e.g. my letter-writing character is English, but my text-editor's yelling about "colour").
Re: Proselint
#40This sounds interesting. As a bit of constructive criticism, please put some examples high up. You tell me it does cool things. Great, show me. I've looked about on the various pages and can see only one example and I don't understand it: text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared. What's the context of this, what's the error it would have caught in my writing? The…
This would catch something like "even more unique". In fact, looking at the code (https://github.com/amperser/proselint/blob/master/proselint/...) it would even catch something like "extremely unique", which I've been guilty of using.
But yes, there should be examples on the front page.