Is proselint yet another awful grammar checker?
No. Here’s why not:
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 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. Others are on their way and will arrive soon. 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. We call it proselint.
+Writing is notoriously hard, even for the best writers. Yet there is a tremendous amount of knowledge about the discipline 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 extracted and transformed.
-proselint is a command-line utility and web API that is meant to be integrated into other tools. It’s free for personal use. Commercial licenses are available.
+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.)
-With time, proselint will become fast, precise, exhaustive, and authoritative. Eventually, it will be unthinkable to write without it by your side.
+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.
+ +Currently, proselint is a command-line utility that is meant to be integrated into other tools. There’s a plugin for Sublime Text and a live demo. It’s open-source software available under the permissive BSD license. Work on proselint happens over on Github. We welcome contributors.
-Sign up for access to the private beta below, or write to us at hello@proselint.com. We’d love to chat.
+With time, proselint will become fast, precise, exhaustive, and authoritative. Eventually, it will be unthinkable to write without it by your side.