How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
theguardian.com
How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#2This is wonderful. I love to see technology enhancing experts' ability to do what they already do, but faster/more accurately.
Also, I'm a big fan of regex. I think -- probably thanks to jwz's famous quote -- a lot of younger programmers avoid them but they're fantastic for MATCHING. Using them in a Google sheet is a killer MVP to prove out something like this.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#3For those unaware "Grauniad" is a decades-old nickname for The Guardian, used particularly by satirical mag Private Eye in reference to its reputation at one time for typos and the like.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#4As a college student (nearly 20 years ago) I built a tool for our student newspaper that caught frequent violations of the Associated Press style guide. Later, working as a newsroom copy editor, I was shocked at how few tools there were available to enforce style. Really awesome to see this Typerighter tool do it right.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#5For those unaware "Grauniad" is a decades-old nickname for The Guardian, used particularly by satirical mag Private Eye in reference to its reputation at one time for typos and the like. https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/05/origin-of-grauniad/
> reputation at one time for typos and the like
Well-earned into the present day. I regularly see typos even today.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#6Grauniad and the fflong riots...
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#7For those unaware "Grauniad" is a decades-old nickname for The Guardian, used particularly by satirical mag Private Eye in reference to its reputation at one time for typos and the like. https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/05/origin-of-grauniad/
> reputation at one time for typos and the like Well-earned into the present day. I regularly see typos even today.
name me a tier-1 paper without typos. the point about the graun, is how entertaining they could be.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> reputation at one time for typos and the like Well-earned into the present day. I regularly see typos even today.
name me a tier-1 paper without typos. the point about the graun, is how entertaining they could be.
Honestly I don't see that many typos in other papers; grammatical issues, sure. But it would appear that not knowing what the squiggly red underlined words are is a requirement of being a Graun writer or editor.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
name me a tier-1 paper without typos. the point about the graun, is how entertaining they could be.
Honestly I don't see that many typos in other papers; grammatical issues, sure. But it would appear that not knowing what the squiggly red underlined words are is a requirement of being a Graun writer or editor.
It is true they were notorious. Sufficiently so for it to be the standing joke of their name in Private Eye. It is also true that probably, some of the time, it was in-crowd joking.
I have a deep antipathy to Murdoch press, having said that they used to have remarkably high editorial standards in the Australian flagship newspaper (called "The Australian") and when News Ltd went on a cost cutting drive, around the time of the collapse of their main competitor, Fairfax Ltd (caused by Warwick fairfax, who basically wrecked the empire: he now consults in the USA on .. how to be a successful entrepreneur!) It merged a huge amount of sub-editor functions into a JV with Fairfax, which subsequently basically failed in-place: They sacked the good staff, and kept an out-source agency which had no clue. The Oz, is now pretty U/S for basic grammar AND spelling.
They also routinely now do pun leads. This was funny for about half a second, ever. The Graun also does far too many pun leads. I think all newspapers wind up there.
A good fictional account of news headlines and the journalistic pressures of newspaper writing in happier days is in "leaven of malice" by Robertson Davies: a fictional Canadian newspaper, beset by a cruel trick played in "hatches, matches and dispatches" -"The Shipping News" has its moments too.
Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
#10“ The rule application service is written in Scala, a common choice for Guardian backends”
They even have a snippet of Scala code. I feel like HN must be the target audience