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@benjaminjackson benjaminjackson released this 26 Aug 14:39
· 252 commits to main since this release

The catalog grows from 29 rules to 49. Every new rule was probed against
pre-2022 Hacker News comments or Project Gutenberg texts before shipping,
and each narrowing is pinned by an examples_ok fixture.

New rules

  • worth-saying-plainly (rhetorical-tic, warning): the self-rating
    opener, "Worth saying plainly, ...". Needs all three slots -- evaluative
    adjective, speech verb, manner adverb -- at a sentence or paragraph start.
  • hold-onto-that (rhetorical-tic, warning): the sentence-initial
    reader directive "Hold onto that" / "Hold on to this".
  • cleanly (rhetorical-tic, warning): the bare manner adverb, "splits
    cleanly into", "maps cleanly onto".
  • clean-count (rhetorical-tic, warning): a number plus "clean" plus a
    partition noun, "two clean buckets".
  • cleanest-x (rhetorical-tic, warning): the superlative used to rank
    one's own claim, "the cleanest framing is".
  • clean-x (rhetorical-tic, info): "clean" in front of an idea as
    praise, "a clean abstraction".
  • earns-its-place (rhetorical-tic, warning): "earns its place" and
    "earns its keep", the metaphor of a sentence or feature paying rent.
  • does-a-lot-of-work (rhetorical-tic, warning): the remark that points
    at a word and rates its load, "that qualifier does a lot of work here".
  • failure-mode-here (rhetorical-tic, warning): "the failure mode here
    is", the engineering term borrowed for an argument or a person. The
    deictic "here" is the whole narrowing.
  • thats-the-tension (rhetorical-tic, warning): the sentence-initial
    closer "That's the tension." and "That's the bet:".
  • right-up-until (rhetorical-tic, warning): "right up until it
    doesn't". The intensifier is the narrowing -- the plain "until it doesn't"
    is an old human idiom and stays clean.
  • two-things-true (rhetorical-tic, warning): "two things can be true",
    the concession that names neither half.
  • notice-what-there (rhetorical-tic, warning): the self-referential
    attention cue, "Notice what that argument did there", "Read that again".
  • notice-what (rhetorical-tic, info): the bare sentence-initial
    "Notice what ...", the quiet half of the pair above.
  • none-of-this-is-to-say (rhetorical-tic, warning): the sweeping
    concession that retracts an argument nobody made.
  • if-im-being-honest (rhetorical-tic, info): the candor preamble.
    Plain "to be honest" and "I'll be honest" stay clean.
  • genuinely (rhetorical-tic, info, off by default): every
    "genuinely". No allowlist separates the intensifier from the contrastive
    use, so the rule runs only when named in --select, beside
    rule-of-three.
  • question-isnt (structure, info): the corrective frame in
    interrogative dress, "The question isn't whether X, it's whether Y".
    Requires the resolving clause.
  • and-thats-fine (rhetorical-tic, info): the permission-granting
    closer. The match must open and close a sentence.
  • less-about-more-about (structure, info): the comparative
    reframe, "It's less about X and more about Y". Both halves required.

Changed rules

  • sit-with-that broadened to any object. Two branches: the deictic object
    needs no anchor, any other object needs the sentence-initial imperative.
  • the-punchline-is widened to take "the honest answer is" and "the honest
    version is".
  • worth-naming and worth-saying-plainly widened together and stopped
    double-flagging. Both take more verbs; worth-naming now yields the
    adverb-bearing form to worth-saying-plainly.

Docs

  • docs/SPEC.md credits Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing" and slopwash.com's
    anti-slop ruleset, next to proselint, vale and write-good.
  • The SPEC rule catalog had drifted ten rules behind the code. It is resynced,
    and spec/rules_spec.rb now asserts every rule id appears in docs/SPEC.md,
    the same way it already asserts the README counts.