Proselint
I&#x27;m a writer and editor, and I dislike the idea of this tool quite a bit.<p>1. Writing isn&#x27;t coding. In coding, you can do various types of &quot;cargo cult programming&quot; and &quot;copypasta&quot; and what-have-you -- in other words, as long as the code runs you don&#x27;t necessarily have to know why or how a programming idiom or convention works, or how&#x2F;why expressing it one way in code is better than expressing it another way in code. This definitionally untrue with writing. If you don&#x27;t know the why&#x2F;how of something, then it&#x27;s better for you to botch it and let the reader attempt to parse it so at least they know what they&#x27;re dealing with and how to interpret it (&quot;oh, this guy&#x27;s a non-native speaker, so I&#x27;ll adjust my reception accordingly&quot; or &quot;ah, this person is kind of clueless about the whole sexist language thing, which is good info for me.&quot;).<p>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 &amp; 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.<p>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&#x2F;replace things I do when I get a new piece from a particular writer (e.g. &quot;this person uses &#x27;however&#x27; when she means &#x27;but&#x27;, 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.<p>But this particular command line tool is destined to be either totally unused or massively abused.<p>I&#x27;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.