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Description:

proselint 0.14.0

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 English Usage, an 1100-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 English prose. A linter is a computer program that, akin to a spell checker, scans through a file and detects issues — like how a real lint roller helps you get unwanted lint off of your shirt.
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, Elwyn 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; all in a neat command-line utility that you can integrate into other tools, scripts, and workflows.
Installation
To get this up and running, install it using pip:
pip install proselint

Fedora
sudo dnf install proselint

Debian
sudo apt install python3-proselint

Ubuntu
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt install python3-proselint

Plugins for other software
proselint is available on:

A demo editor
Sublime Text
Atom Editor (thanks to Clay Miller).
Emacs via Flycheck or via Flymake
Vim via ALE or Syntastic (thanks to @lcd047, @Carreau, and Daniel M. Capella)
Neovim via null-ls (null-ls has diagnostics and code actions for proselint)
Phabricator's arc CLI (thanks to Jeff Verkoeyen)
Danger (thanks to David Grandinetti and Orta Therox)
Visual Studio Code (thanks to Patryk Peszko)
coala (thanks to the coala Development Group)
IntelliJ (by Victor Kropp)
pre-commit (by Andy Airey)
Statick
MegaLinter

Usage
Suppose you have a document text.md with the following text:
John is very unique.

You can run proselint over the document using the command line:
proselint text.md

This prints a list of suggestions to stdout, one per line. Each suggestion has the form:
text.md:<line>:<column>: <check_name> <message>

For example,
text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' cannot be compared.

The command-line utility can also print 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' cannot 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,

// length from start -> end
extent: 11,

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

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

To run the linter as part of another Python program, you can use the lint function in proselint.tools:
import proselint

suggestions = proselint.tools.lint("This sentence is very unique")

This will return a list of suggestions:
[('weasel_words.very', "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.", 0, 17, 17, 22, 5, 'warning', None), ('uncomparables.misc', "Comparison of an uncomparable: 'very unique.' is not comparable.", 0, 17, 17, 29, 12, 'warning', None)]

Checks
You can disable any of the checks by modifying $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/proselint/config.json.
If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set or empty, ~/.config/proselint/config.json will be used.
Additionally, for compatibility reasons, the legacy configurations ~/.proselintrc and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/proselint/config will be checked if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/proselint/config.json does not exist.
{
"checks": {
"typography.diacritical_marks": false
}
}

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

lgbtq.offensive_terms
Avoding offensive LGBTQ terms

lgbtq.terms
Misused LGBTQ terms

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.narcissism
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 correctly

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.

Issue Tracker
Source Code

Support
If you run into a problem, please open an issue in or send an email to hello@amperser.com.
Running Automated Tests
Automated tests are included in the proselint/tests directory. To run these tests locally, you can use ./utils.
License
The project is licensed under the BSD license.