Writing is notoriously hard, even for the best writers, and it's not for lack of good advice — a tremendous amount of knowledge about the craft is strewn across usage guides, dictionaries, technical manuals, essays, pamphlets, websites, and the hearts and minds of great authors and editors. But poring over Strunk & White hardly makes one a better writer — it turns you into neither Strunk nor White. And nobody has the capacity to apply all the advice from Garner’s Modern American Usage, a 975-page usage guide, to everything they write. In fact, the whole notion that one becomes a better writer by reading advice on writing rests on untenable assumptions about learning and memory. The traditional formats of knowledge about writing are thus essentially inert, waiting to be transformed.

We devised a simple solution: proselint, a linter for prose. (A linter is a computer program that, like a spell checker, scans through a document and analyzes it.)

proselint places the world’s greatest writers and editors by your side, where they whisper suggestions on how to improve your prose. You’ll be guided by advice inspired by Bryan Garner, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk, Steve Pinker, Mary Norris, Mark Twain, Elmore Leonard, George Orwell, Matthew Butterick, William Strunk, E.B. White, Philip Corbett, Ernest Gowers, and the editorial staff of the world’s finest literary magazines and newspapers, among others. Our goal is to aggregate knowledge about best practices in writing and to make that knowledge immediately accessible to all authors in the form of a linter for prose.

proselint is a command-line utility that can be integrated into existing tools.

Installation

To get this up and running, install it using pip: pip install proselint.

Usage

You can run proselint on a document:

❯ proselint text.md

This prints a list of suggestions to stdout, one per line. Each suggestion will have the form:

text.md:<line>:<column>: <check_name> <message>

For example,

text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared.

The command-line utility can also print the list of suggestions in JSON using the --json flag. In this case, the output is considerably richer:

{
    // Type of check that output this suggestion.
    check: "wallace.uncomparables",

    // Message to describe the suggestion.
    message: "Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared.",

    // The person or organization giving the suggestion.
    source: "David Foster Wallace"

    // URL pointing to the source material.
    source_url: "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/a/9715551"

    // Line where the error starts.
    line: 0,

    // Column where the error starts.
    column: 10,

    // Index in the text where the error starts.
    start: 10,

    // Index in the text where the error ends.
    end: 21,

    // start - end
    extent: 11,

    // How important is this? Can be "suggestion", "warning", or "error".
    severity: "warning",

    // Possible replacements.
    replacements: [
        {
            value: "unique"
        }
    ]
}

Available plugins for text editors

proselint is available on:

• A live demo page
• Sublime Text
• Atom Editor (thanks to Clay Miller).
• Emacs via Flycheck (thanks to Aaron Jacobs)
• Vim (thanks to Matthias Bussonnier)
• Phabricator's arc CLI (thanks to Jeff Verkoeyen)

Checks

You can disable any of the checks by modifying .proselintrc.

ID	Description
airlinese.misc	Avoiding jargon of the airline industry
annotations.misc	Catching annotations left in the text
archaism.misc	Avoiding archaic forms
cliches.hell	Avoiding a common cliché
cliches.misc	Avoiding clichés
consistency.spacing	Consistent sentence spacing
consistency.spelling	Consistent spelling
corporate_speak.misc	Avoiding corporate buzzwords`
cursing.filth	Words to avoid
cursing.nfl	Avoiding words banned by the NFL
dates_times.am_pm	Using the right form for the time of day
dates_times.dates	Stylish formatting of dates
hedging.misc	Not hedging
hyperbole.misc	Not being hyperbolic
jargon.misc	Avoiding miscellaneous jargon
lexical_illusions.misc	Avoiding lexical illusions
links.broken	Linking only to existing sites
malapropisms.misc	Avoiding common malapropisms
misc.apologizing	Being confident
misc.back_formations	Avoiding needless backformations
misc.bureaucratese	Avoiding bureaucratese
misc.but	Avoid starting a paragraph with "But..."
misc.capitalization	Capitalizing only what ought to be capitalized
misc.chatspeak	Avoiding lolling and other chatspeak
misc.commercialese	Avoiding jargon of the commercial world
misc.currency	Avoiding redundant currency symbols
misc.debased	Avoiding debased language
misc.false_plurals	Avoiding false plurals
misc.illogic	Avoiding illogical forms
misc.inferior_superior	Superior to, not than
misc.latin	Avoiding overuse of Latin phrases
misc.many_a	Many a singular
misc.metaconcepts	Avoiding overuse of metaconcepts
misc.narcisissm	Talking about the subject, not its study
misc.phrasal_adjectives	Hyphenating phrasal adjectives
misc.preferred_forms	Miscellaneous preferred forms
misc.pretension	Avoiding being pretentious
misc.professions	Calling jobs by the right name
misc.punctuation	Using punctuation assiduously
misc.scare_quotes	Using scare quotes only when needed
misc.suddenly	Avoiding the word suddenly
misc.tense_present	Advice from Tense Present
misc.waxed	Waxing poetic
misc.whence	Using "whence"
mixed_metaphors.misc	Not mixing metaphors
mondegreens.misc	Avoiding mondegreen
needless_variants.misc	Using the preferred form
nonwords.misc	Avoid using nonwords
oxymorons.misc	Avoiding oxymorons
psychology.misc	Avoiding misused psychological terms
redundancy.misc	Avoiding redundancy and saying things twice
redundancy.ras_syndrome	Avoiding RAS syndrome
skunked_terms.misc	Avoid using skunked terms
spelling.able_atable	-able vs. -atable
spelling.able_ible	-able vs. -ible
spelling.athletes	Spelling of athlete names
spelling.em_im_en_in	-em vs. -im and -en vs. -in
spelling.er_or	-er vs. -or
spelling.in_un	in- vs. un-
spelling.misc	Spelling words corectly
security.credit_card	Keeping credit card numbers secret
security.password	Keeping passwords secret
sexism.misc	Avoiding sexist language
terms.animal_adjectives	Animal adjectives
terms.denizen_labels	Calling denizens by the right name
terms.eponymous_adjectives	Calling people by the right name
terms.venery	Call groups of animals by the right name
typography.diacritical_marks	Using dïacríticâl marks
typography.exclamation	Avoiding overuse of exclamation
typography.symbols	Using the right symbols
uncomparables.misc	Not comparing uncomparables
weasel_words.misc	Avoiding weasel words
weasel_words.very	Avoiding the word "very"

Contributing

Interested in contributing to proselint? Great — there are plenty of ways you can help. Read more on our website, where we describe how you can help us build proselint into the greatest writing tool in the world.