Writing is notoriously hard, even for the best writers. Yet there is a tremendous amount of knowledge about the discipline 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 American Usage, a 975-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 prose. (A linter is a computer program that, like a spell checker, scans through a document and analyzes it.)

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, E.B. 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.

proselint is a command-line utility that can be integrated into existing tools.

Installation

To get this up and running, install it using pip: pip install proselint.

Usage

You can run proselint on a document:

❯ proselint text.md

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

text.md:<line>:<column>: <check_name> <message>

For example,

text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared.

The command-line utility can also print the list of 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' can not 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,

    // start - end
    extent: 11,

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

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

Checks

You can disable any of the checks by modifying .proselintrc.

ID	Description
butterick.symbols	Using the right symbol
carlin.filth	Words to avoid
consistency.spacing	Consistent sentence spacing
consistency.spelling	Consistent use of British vs. American spelling
garner.airlinese	Avoiding jargon of the airline industry
garner.am_pm	Using the right form for the time of day
garner.animal_labels	Likening things to animals using fun words
garner.archaism	Avoiding archaic forms
garner.back_formations	Avoiding needless backformations
garner.capitalization	Captializing what ought to be capitalized
garner.cliches	Avoiding cliché
garner.commercialese	Avoiding jargon of the commercial world
garner.dates	Stylish formatting of dates
garner.denizen_labels	Calling people the right names
garner.diacritical_marks	Using dïacríticâl marks
garner.illogic	Avoiding illogical forms
garner.jargon	Avoiding miscellaneous jargon
garner.malapropisms	Avoiding common malapropisms
garner.many_a	Many a singular
garner.misspelling	Avoiding common misspellings missed by spell-check
garner.mixed_metaphors	Not mixing metaphors
garner.mondegreens	Avoiding mondegreens
garner.needless_variants	Using the preferred form
garner.oxymorons	Avoiding oxymorons
garner.preferred_forms	Miscellaneous preferred forms
garner.punctuation	Using the right punctuation
garner.redundancy	Avoiding redundancy
garner.sexism	Avoiding sexist language
gowers.overworked_metaphors	Overworked metaphors
inc.corporate_speak	Avoiding corporate buzzwords
leonard.exclamation	Avoiding hyperbolic use of exclamation
leonard.hell	Avoiding a common cliché
lilienfeld.terms_to_avoid	Avoiding misused psychological terms
misc.annotations	Catching annotations left in the text
misc.chatspeak	Avoiding lolling and other chatspeak
misc.credit_card	Keeping credit card numbers secret
misc.currency	Avoiding redundant currency symbols
misc.hyperbolic	Not being hyperbolic
misc.link_checker	Linking only to existing sites
misc.password	Keeping passwords secret
misc.whence	Usage of the word "whence"
nfl.naughty_words	Avoiding words banned by the NFL
nordquist.redundancy	Avoiding redundancy and saying things twice
norris.denizen_labels	Using the right denizen label
ogilvy.pretension	Avoiding being pretentious
orwell.debased	Avoiding debased language
oxford.venery_terms	Call groups of animals by the right name
palahniuk.suddenly	Avoiding the word suddenly
pinker.apologizing	Being confident
pinker.hedging	Not hedging
pinker.latin	Avoiding overuse of Latin phrases
pinker.metaconcepts	Avoiding overuse of metaconcepts
pinker.narcisissm	Talking about the subject, not its study
pinker.scare_quotes	Using scare quotes only when needed
strunk_white.composition	Avoiding wordy phrases
strunk_white.greylist	Words to avoid
strunk_white.usage	Misc. usage recommendations
twain.damn	Avoiding the word "very"
wallace.tense_present	Misc. advice
wallace.uncomparables	Not comparing uncomparables
write_good.cliches	Avoiding cliches
write_good.lexical_illusions	Avoiding lexical illusions
write_good.weasel_words	Avoiding weasel words
wsj.athletes	Spelling the names of athletes correctly

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.