proselint

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

Nix

proselint is packaged by nixpkgs.

pre-commit

To use proselint with pre-commit, or prek, point its config at this repository:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/amperser/proselint
    rev: v0.16.0
    hooks:
      - id: proselint

Be sure to change rev to use the desired proselint git tag or revision.

Thanks to Andy Airey for the pre-commit configuration.

Declarative

environment.systemPackages = [pkgs.proselint];

Imperative

nix profile install nixpkgs#proselint

Plugins for other software

proselint is available on:

• Vim via ALE
• Emacs via Flycheck
• CI/CD via MegaLinter
• Neovim via none-ls.nvim

The following plugins are also available, but they are archived or unmaintained:

• IntelliJ plugin by Victor Kropp
• Flymake plugin by Manuel Uberti
• Sublime Text plugin by Jordan Suchow
• Phabricator Arc plugin by Jeff Verkoeyen
• Visual Studio Code plugin by Patryk Peszko
• Coala plugin by the Coala Development Group
• Danger plugin by David Grandinetti and Orta Therox
• Syntastic plugin by LCD 047, M Bussonnier, and Daniel M. Cappella

Usage

On the command line

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 check text.md

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

file:<line>:<column>: <check_name>: <message>

For example,

text.md:1:9: uncomparables: Comparison of an uncomparable: 'very unique' is not comparable.

The command-line utility can also print suggestions in JSON using the --output-format json option. In this case, the output is considerably richer, following our stable wire schema.

…

As a library

To run the linter as part of another Python program, you can use the LintFile class in proselint.tools. This requires CheckRegistry to be populated.

from proselint.checks import __register__
from proselint.registry import CheckRegistry
from proselint.tools import LintFile

CheckRegistry().register_many(__register__)
suggestions = LintFile("source-name", "This sentence is very unique").lint()

This will return a list of suggestions:

[LintResult(
    check_result=CheckResult(
        check_path='uncomparables',
        message="Comparison of an uncomparable: 'very unique' is not comparable.",
        span=(18, 29),
        replacements=None,
    ),
    pos=(1, 18),
)]

Configuring

[!NOTE] proselint searches for configuration files in the order described below, and loads the first file it finds. If no configuration files are found, it falls back to its built in defaults.

1. The file given by the --config flag, if specified
2. proselint.json in the current working directory
3. proselint.json in any directory above the current working directory
4. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/proselint/config.json, defaulting to ~/.config/proselint/config.json if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set

This section's examples use JSONC for comments and trailing commas. Please ensure you remove these features from your own configuration to avoid errors.

The configuration schema and defaults are as follows:

{
    // The maximum allowable number of results proselint can output.
    "max_errors": 1000,
    // Checks to select or deselect.
    "checks": {
        // ...
    },
    // Checks to select or deselect on a per-file basis. These are merged with
    // the selections specified in "checks" so you don't have to repeat them.
    "per_file_checks": {},
}

Check selection

Check selection is granular at any level, illustrated in the following example:

{
  "checks": {
    "typography": true,
    "typography.symbols": false,
    "typography.symbols.curly_quotes": true,
    "typography.punctuation.hyperbole": false
  }
}

This configuration would enable all checks in the typography module, excluding typography.punctuation.hyperbole and those in typography.symbols, but preserving typography.symbols.curly_quotes. Using this system allows you to concisely and precisely select checks at an individual level.

Per-file checks

[!WARNING] The path globs described in this section work differently than you may be used to. Refer to the Python documentation for partial non-recursive globs for more information.

You can select different checks for different files, or files matching given partial globs. Take the following example.

{
    "checks": {
        "typography": true,
        // ...
    },
    "per_file_checks": {
        "*.md": {
            "typography": false,
        },
    },
}

This configuration would select typography for all files except markdown files. Values in per_file_checks are the same as in checks, and have exactly the same features.

Checks

ID Description annotations Catch annotations left in the text archaism Avoid archaic forms cliches.hell Avoid a common cliché regarding hell cliches.misc Avoid clichés dates_times.am_pm Format the time of day correctly dates_times.dates Format dates appropriately hedging Avoid undermining yourself with uncertainty industrial_language.airlinese Avoid jargon of the airline industry industrial_language.bureaucratese Avoid bureaucratese industrial_language.chatspeak Avoid lolling and other chatspeak industrial_language.commercialese Avoid jargon of the commercial world industrial_language.corporate_speak Avoid corporate buzzwords industrial_language.jargon Avoid miscellaneous jargon lexical_illusions Avoid repeating words or phrases malapropisms Avoid common malapropisms misc.apologizing Be confident and avoid excessive apologizing misc.back_formations Avoid redundant backformations misc.but Do not start a paragraph with "But..." misc.capitalization Capitalize only what ought to be capitalized misc.composition Adhere to principles of composition misc.currency Avoid redundant currency symbols misc.debased Avoid debased language misc.false_plurals Avoid false plurals misc.greylist Avoid greylisted terms misc.illogic Avoid illogical forms misc.inferior_superior Superior to, not than misc.institution_name Use the correct names of institutions misc.latin Avoid overuse of Latin phrases misc.many_a Use singular forms with "many a" misc.metadiscourse Avoid discussing the discussio