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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 fromGarner’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.

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

You can runproselint 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 - endextent:11,// How important is this? Can be "suggestion", "warning", or "error".severity:"warning",// Possible replacements.replacements:[{value:"unique"}]}

proselint is available on:

• A livedemo page
• Sublime Text
• Atom Editor (thanks toClay Miller).
• Emacs via Flycheck (thanks toAaron Jacobs)
• Vim (thanks toMatthias Bussonnier)

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

Interested in contributing toproselint? Great — there are plenty of ways you can help. Read more onour website, where we describe how you can help us buildproselint into the greatest writing tool in the world.