Style-Scanner, written by Jack Kinsella (blog), helps you improve your English language writing. Based on stylistic advice given by authors such as Skrunk and White, Bill Bryson and George Orwell, Style-Scanner scans your text and markup files then lists issues found. Currently it spots the following problems:
- Use of 600 different clichés
He pushed the envelope - Use of 11 different forms of passive tense.
The letter was sent - Broken links
http://www.thiswebsite404s.com - Ugly words
The government utilized the resources. - Speaking in generalities
Many people think that - Useless words
It was a very fast app. - Repeating the same non structural word within a sentence
Trask makes an excellent point, forcefully and with taste, in his excellent work ‘Mind The Gaffe’ - Using latin abbreviations within your text
E.g. - Spelling mistakes
addd - Repeating the same word consecutively
We went to the the shopping centre. - Excess white space
We went to the shopping centre. - Capitalization Problems
On monday we will have an exam.
Linguistic analysis is a hard problem, so you cannot expect perfect results. Think of Style-Scanner as guidelines to alert you of
possible faults. *Remember at best prescriptive stylistic guides can bring you up to a B minus standard of writing. * Anything more is beyond the scope of this tool.
Install Style-Scanner using Ruby gems:
gem install style-scanner
Next install Hunspell, an open source spell-checker that Style-Scanner depends upon.
brew install hunspell
Style-Scanner is command line only. Cd into the directory with the files you’d like to scan, then type
style-scanner filename
After a few seconds Style-Scanner will print a list problems it finds.
Style-Scanner is pipe friendly.
cat filename | style-scanner
See all command line options
style-scanner -h
By default some scans, such as the Adverb scan, are turned off. Use command line options to enable them.
style-scanner -a filename #scan for adverbs
Scan HTML files
style-scanner filename.html --help
Scan Textile files
style-scanner filename.html -t
punkt-segmenter
Splits text into sentences.
colorize
Formats terminal output in red,green and other colours.
entagger
Assigns parts of speech tags to English text based on a lookup dictionary and a set of probability values.
RedCloth
Converts Textile to HTML
Sanitize
Converts HTML to plain text
Hunspell
An open source spell checker used by Open Office, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Contribution is welcomed and encouraged, although no modifications will be accepted if they are not accompanied by passing tests.
| Tag | Part Of Speech | Examples |
| CC | Conjunction, coordinating | and, or |
| CD | Adjective, cardinal number | 3, fifteen |
| DET | Determiner | this, each, some |
| EX | Pronoun, existential there | there |
| FW | Foreign words | |
| IN | Preposition / Conjunction | for, of, although, that |
| JJ | Adjective | happy, bad |
| JJR | Adjective, comparative | happier, worse |
| JJS | Adjective, superlative | happiest, worst |
| LS | Symbol, list item | A, A. |
| MD | Verb, modal | can, could, ’ll |
| NN | Noun | aircraft, data |
| NNP | Noun, proper | London, Michael |
| NNPS | Noun, proper, plural | Australians, Methodists |
| NNS | Noun, plural | women, books |
| PDT | Determiner, prequalifier | quite, all, half |
| POS | Possessive | ’s, ’ |
| PRP | Determiner, possessive second | mine, yours |
| PRPS | Determiner, possessive | their, your |
| RB | Adverb | often, not, very, here |
| RBR | Adverb, comparative | faster |
| RBS | Adverb, superlative | fastest |
| RP | Adverb, particle | up, off, out |
| SYM | Symbol | * |
| TO | Preposition | to |
| UH | Interjection | oh, yes, mmm |
| VB | Verb, infinitive | take, live |
| VBD | Verb, past tense | took, lived |
| VBG | Verb, gerund | taking, living |
| VBN | Verb, past/passive participle | taken, lived |
| VBP | Verb, base present form | take, live |
| VBZ | Verb, present 3SG -s form | takes, lives |
| WDT | Determiner, question | which, whatever |
| WP | Pronoun, question | who, whoever |
| WPS | Determiner, possessive & question | whose |
| WRB | Adverb, question | when, how, however |
| PP | Punctuation, sentence ender | , !, ? |
| PPC | Punctuation, comma | , |
| PPD | Punctuation, dollar sign | $ |
| PPL | Punctuation, quotation mark left | `` |
| PPR | Punctuation, quotation mark right | ’’ |
| PPS | Punctuation, colon, semicolon, elipsis | :, …, – |
| LRB | Punctuation, left bracket | (, {, [ |
| RRB | Punctuation, right bracket | ), }, ] |
1 Add more acronyms
2 Refactor the collection methods.
4 More useless words.
5 Troublesome words from Stunk.
8 Tense switches
9 Improve tests by:
a Creating a sentence helper
b Making a better Rspec matcher (more informative erros)
c Automatically detecting the correct problem
10 Desktop app
11 Globalize spell check
12 Most overused words
13 Suggestions for synonyms
14 Code overview screencast
Jack Kinsella
Robert Dooley, developer in Galway Western, Ireland
Style-Scanner is released under the MIT license
Copyright Jack Kinsella