Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Proselint

proselint.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 141 posts

Re: Proselint

#41

Post by ghshephard »

techdragon wrote: post #33
suchow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

If you are going to specify a currency, write USD 10 (though spoken, it's 10 USD).

If the context is explicitly local (such as a local newspaper, menu), then $10 is sufficient in the United States.

Re: Proselint

#42

Post by suchow »

raphman wrote: post #37

Are 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)

It's out of scope for now, but only because we don't have any native speakers of other languages helping us out with the project, and this stuff is hard enough to get write in your native tongue; otherwise it's on the table. Interested?

Re: Proselint

#43

Post by Singletoned »

suchow wrote: post #42
raphman wrote: post #37

Are 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)

It's out of scope for now, but only because we don't have any native speakers of other languages helping us out with the project, and this stuff is hard enough to get write in your native tongue; otherwise it's on the table. Interested?

> this stuff is hard enough to get write in your native tongue

Was that deliberate?

Re: Proselint

#44

Post by synthmeat »

Here's a suggestion...

Have copy on web site be intentionally incorrect, red-underlined with (small modals? tooltips?) that show what's been corrected/suggested by the tool.

Re: Proselint

#45

Post by MatthewWilkes »

While the idea is interesting, I do worry about the proliferation of linting to prose. Especially the hint about authoritative near the end of the article. Linters turn guidelines into steadfast rules in programming, removing all ability to use judgement if you want your PR merged. I personally want less of that, not more.

Re: Proselint

#46

Post by SixSigma »

IanCal wrote: post #34

This 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…

One cannot have gradations of uniqueness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdZtM3_Lcy4

Re: Proselint

#47

Post by raphman »

suchow wrote: post #42
raphman wrote: post #37

Are 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)

It's out of scope for now, but only because we don't have any native speakers of other languages helping us out with the project, and this stuff is hard enough to get write in your native tongue; otherwise it's on the table. Interested?

I'd certainly contribute a few rules for German prose. Actually, I'm even more interested in using proselint with custom rules for theater plays (e.g., check for unneccessary repetitions, word combinations that are (acoustically) hard to understand).

As czechdeveloper has pointed out in this thread, it would also be nice to have a set of rules specifically for academic writing and/or for non-native speakers (e.g., Asian scientists seem prone to overuse "the").

I guess, a first step would be to have an extensible set of tags for the rules - both language-specifying ones (i.e., any_language, american_english, british_english, german, ...) and genre-specifying ones (any_genre, prose, poetry, academic, technical, ...). Furthermore, an easy way to select a subset of rules by tag (e.g., british_english and academic) would be neccessary.

Would that fit within your goals for proselint?

Re: Proselint

#49

Post by shawabawa3 »

IanCal wrote: post #34

This 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…

Some people feel you should never ever say things like "more unique", "most unique" etc

Which I think is equally as misguided as trying to force "data" to be plural, and that "less than 3" is wrong

Re: Proselint

#50

Post by hk__2 »

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/

Hemingway is an editor while Proselint is a tool. The latter can be integrated in any editor. That’s the main reason I ditched Hemingway (the editor) because I couldn’t just copy/paste text in it to get some suggestions.
Post reply on HN