Proselint

> Get that off of me before I catch on fire! > Needless variant. 'catch fire' is the preferred form

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "catch fire" rather than "catch on fire".

From the UK if that changes anything.

Instead of saying everything is unique we could simply say that there is nothing. A thing is itself an abstraction. The concrete world is without inherently distinct things. We must abstract things for "unique" to describe something at all. As you implied, this process is arbitrary. Every way in which you could abstract things implies a distinct notion of "uniqueness". To simply select one "uniqueness" (like mathematics) is arbitrary. But to consider every possible "uniqueness" equally is also arbitrary. Without prioritizing forms of "uniqueness" we can only construct a partially ordered set. So when you void a fixation on mathematics, things can be more, less or "incomparably" unique.

I suspect most pairs of things are incomparably unique. Further, I suspect most binary qualities are predominantly incomparable. I don't know that you should never say things like "more unique" but it might be fair to issue a warning in a prose linter. Any binary quality used as a continuum requires an arbitrary combination of it's distinct forms. If this isn't specified then it only has meaning for those who already know what it is.

1. Writing isn't coding. In coding, you can do various types of "cargo cult programming" and "copypasta" and what-have-you -- in other words, as long as the code runs you don't necessarily have to know why or how a programming idiom or convention works, or how/why expressing it one way in code is better than expressing it another way in code. This definitionally untrue with writing. If you don't know the why/how of something, then it's better for you to botch it and let the reader attempt to parse it so at least they know what they're dealing with and how to interpret it ("oh, this guy's a non-native speaker, so I'll adjust my reception accordingly" or "ah, this person is kind of clueless about the whole sexist language thing, which is good info for me.").

2. 90% of writing style advice falls into one of two categories: a) hotly debated, and b) totally wrong. Most of it is in the latter category, and this includes Strunk & White (just use google for numerous takedowns of that text). I looked through the PR queue and saw that it consists of eager coders finding style advice from various sources and trying to work that into the tool. That is terrible, terrible, terrible... This will guarantee that the tool will represent a collection of awful writing advice gleaned from dubious sources and wielded with unforgiving ignorance.

This tool may be a terrible idea, but the idea of automated prose linting is not terrible. Most beginner to intermediate writers have tics, and as an editor I often have a couple of writer-specific find/replace things I do when I get a new piece from a particular writer (e.g. "this person uses 'however' when she means 'but', and this person overuses these four business jargon terms, etc.). If editors were able to easily compose and execute writer-specific linters from within something like Wordpress, that would probably be pretty great.

But this particular command line tool is destined to be either totally unused or massively abused.

I'm sorry, I hate to be mean... or, actually, there is a small part of me that enjoys playing Mr. Party Pooper when I see a mob of enthusiastic programmers trying to tie down some great cultural Gulliver with a thousand tiny little automated, black-and-white rules.