They don't mention that you can write the rules yourself and also pick and choose from existing rules from GitHub.
There is an attempt to build and open source version of Grammarly using vale rules here[1]. Rules are mainly regex based, but some target readability measures[2] or use parts of speech[3].
It seems openly is just a folder with rules on your hard drive. Vale is also offline ... don't really understand your comment.
I would not use anything closed source and bloated as Word. I wrote my BSc. thesis in it in the 2000s. Could not open it correctly anymore after 5 years. It took ages to open.
Switched to vim and latex for my master and phd thesis. Never looked back ...
It’s too late to edit my original post but this wasn’t meant as an accusation of vale, it was actually intended as praise for vale the tool given most others are basically keyloggers.
Thank you for this - an example of the config made it all so much clearer - I would recommended the author steal some of that post for their README
To over-simplify, vale runs hundreds of pre-built regexes that suggest changes to over-used phrases, likely function names etc etc. Google etc have pre-built fairly good defaults I suspect.
(To be fair this is trying to get consistency across huge document bases, and will never replace a human's authentic voice for communication. But sometimes you just want to make sure there are the same number of blueberries in each muffin)
Ok - my mission after next - get something like this brought in at work
I took a whack at using Vale a year or so ago, but was overwhelmed by having to either:
* creating my own style guide
* using one of the existing ones
We have a DevDocsReadme that has some style rules we enforce manually. Is the best way to get going with vale to start with that doc and write rules for that?
Can you apply rules to asciidoc and markdown source docs, or do you have to apply it to the end product (HTML, etc)?
It seems like such a cool idea. Any pointers to 'get started' for existing largeish documentation sets would be much appreciated. (I will read your tutorial, @remoquete.)
boredom is useful to a writer. a lot of my favorite writers have mentioned writing all first drafts with pen and paper. what happens in your brain when you're writing is important, even when it feels boring, slow, or repetitive. who has a better sense of where my attention should be, me or a tool? imo better writing is the product of practice, reading, and better thinking.
all of that to say, if you have a pre-publishing step where you need to check spelling, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, etc. a linter might fit in at that step. but i really don't think a tool is better than your own reading or giving it to an editor you trust.
In addition to the false positives, automated linters pick up on the little errors that blow right past manual review. It's no substitute for human editing for content, but it is better for nitpicking and cleanup.
I can see where you’re coming from but I don’t believe something like Vale will - in practice, not in theory - actually do that. You would need a general purpose AI to pull that off, otherwise domain-specific, bespoke, one-off tools (eg to transform an API into a documentation template, to make skeleton release notes out of git/GitHub/Jira/whatever records, etc) combined with a two-hour crash course on effective writing are probably the way to go.
But obviously enough people disagree that this is a thing.. although that could be said for quite a number of “technical progress” milestones we currently celebrate.
When people talk about "writing" on here, they typically referring to the kind of prose that benefits from stuff like this: technical, aiming to be informative, and adhere to industry standards or conventions. Not to mention the fact that this is industry with a lot of ESL writers.
They aren't, typically, talking about the kind of stuff that you work on in a creative writing elective you take one semester. The very same class, in fact, that gave you this presumptuousness.
One misspelling, mixed metaphor, missing contraction.
Nobody writes flawlessly. It is hard to find your own mistakes, much less understand if content will make sense to someone else.
An editor is someone who can read your work, help catch errors and suggest improvements.
No you don't need to go pay someone, but either trade editing with a friend or find another way to compensate whoever is providing editing for you. I usually buy my editors dinner but adjust based on how much time investment you are asking of them.
You do not get to choose when a writer uses a contraction. You might expect that I'd have used "don't" there, but the simple truth is people use the full words even conversationally sometimes. This is especially true when they want to emphasize the "not" part of a phrase like "will not", "would not", or "do not". Your suggested edit changes the meaning of the parent post a shade.
Where's the mixed metaphor? You may be able to sell me on "weird gate to keep" being a trite metaphor or perhaps even an awkward metaphor. What's mixed about gatekeeping, which seems to be a single common metaphor?
If this is the quality of editing the tool offers, one may wish to stick with spellcheck. Encouraging a particular organization's writing style within that organization can have some nice effects, but you don't get to determine everyone else's writing style.
Editors are expensive and publishers don't really provide that service to authors, anymore. You're expected to have that all taken care of before you submit, even to publications that barely pay (or even some that don't pay at all).
Page is blank for me and I couldn't find a version though your site's search.
Your experience is that editors are cheap and that publishers readily supply substantial editing services, not requiring that practically all editing work is done before entertaining a submission? That's contrary to the experience of multiple close friends and relatives who are writers or are working on getting published, and to that of multiple others I follow whose experiences I've heard or read about.
Sorry about that. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s fixed now.
I don’t know what you mean by editors being cheap. I don’t pay them, they’re employees of the publications I write for. I assume they’re underpaid, of course.
My first draft is better than the finished product you’ll find in most publications (not bragging, it’s just the truth). Before it’s published, however, it goes through several rounds of editing with from one to three editors, and a technical review. This can last weeks. I may have to generate five revisions before it’s good enough. It could be that your acquaintances are writing for publications with lower standards.
EDIT: By the way, if you have friends who are submitting to publications that don’t pay, or pay only a token amount, please suggest to them that they stop. This depresses the market for writers who are tying to make a living with it. Don’t fall for the “exposure” gambit or give away your stuff to feed your ego. You‘re being robbed.
> Sorry about that. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s fixed now.
No problem, shit happens.
> My first draft is better than the finished product you’ll find in most publications (not bragging, it’s just the truth). Before it’s published, however, it goes through several rounds of editing with from one to three editors, and a technical review. This can last weeks. I may have to generate five revisions before it’s good enough. It could be that your acquaintances are writing for publications with lower standards.
Premier genre periodicals, as no other short fiction venues pay worth a damn, these days. Novels through trad publishing—the ones I know who self-publish barely edit at all and certainly don't pay for editors, which is, judging from the quality of the median self-published work, evidently the norm in that world. Household-name monthlies, with non-fiction writing, in those cases, though some of those publications do also print fiction.
The ones I know who publish longer-form non-fiction writing do seem to get somewhat more support from their publishers, to be fair, but most of the editing work does still need to be done before submission or you're getting round-filed. Those also tend to be more well-defined and goal-oriented pieces, so content editing is less necessary or extensive.
What most will do, at least, is tell you what to cut if they need the piece to be shorter.
[EDIT]
> EDIT: By the way, if you have friends who are submitting to publications that don’t pay, or pay only a token amount, please suggest to them that they stop. This depresses the market for writers who are tying to make a living with it. Don’t fall for the “exposure” gambit or give away your stuff to feed your ego. You‘re being robbed.
Oh don't worry, they're all pretty allergic to that. Good warning though, and worth mentioning. The lit-fic market especially is a complete joke in this regard. But I suppose it's hard to blame publishers when they have such a glut of people willing to put words to paper for little or no compensation.
Hmm. I had in mind non-fiction, as we were discussing editing. I can't imagine a fiction writer wanting his or her creations to be touched by an editor. But I accept your report that such people exist.
A lot of fiction writers don’t, but desperately need such editing.
I’ve read plenty of books that could have told the story in 20% fewer pages, or had a swapped character name, or…
Some of these passed through multiple layers of editing. Some of these "passed" through those layers because the writer got too famous or cantankerous or…
I acted as one of my wife’s editors for her books, and some of the things that I checked (as it was recent historical fiction) included whether the weather she described for a chapter matched the weather reported by Environment Canada. She had one scene in early April of a year where she said that the "last of the snows had gone…", but there was a snowstorm on the 3rd of April or something like that. As the weather was not critical to the scene, I insisted that it either be dropped or changed (she changed it) — because getting that sort of item wrong can throw a reader out of the flow of the book.
In another instance in her second book, she had a weather condition that was crucial to the plot. We looked to see that it would be plausible (e.g., it was not 50℃ in February in Toronto in 1979), then let the weather condition stand because it mattered.
As a heads up, this is not loading for me. Your other pages seem fine, and I'm not getting a 404, just an empty page. Doesn't seem to be adblock or pihole.
Yes, editors are wonderful and ought to be paid well (even if authors aren't...) but authors who can't afford editors (i.e. all the ones trying to break in to writing but who don't have substantial financial backing) benefit greatly from tools that help them do their own editing more efficiently.
I don’t believe it (but am willing to consider actual evidence, if any exists). Spellcheckers, sure. But until we get an actual AI with general intelligence and cultural awareness sufficient to understand the nuances of human language, even “grammar checking” can not be mechanized.
Really, anyone considering working as an author who can’t produce an excellent, polished first draft without an editor should consider a line of work more attuned to his or her talents.
> Really, anyone considering working as an author who can’t produce an excellent, polished first draft without an editor should consider a line of work more attuned to his or her talents.
Really, anyone considering being a programmer who can't write a program without bugs on the first try without an IDE should...
Yeah that seems overly harsh and incorrect. Skills take time and practice to develop.
Sure, maybe, but the better automated tools get, the higher standards will be before submissions are considered. I bet slush-pile readers were a lot more tolerant of the occasional tranpsosed letter before spell check existed, for instance. Now if there's even one misspelling in a piece it looks like you're not trying at all, since you should have seen the red-squiggle, and into the rejections you go. So it will become (already is becoming) for brevity, clear wording, avoiding repetition, et c.
If tools save time or reduce the technical skill required, that seems great to me. Art's about the finished product, not how it gets there, though popular understanding of how artists work and how they actually work may differ substantially. Almost no authors can always recall the exact word they want, the precise wording of that phrase they want to quote, the rule for some particular piece of grammar, and so on—they may have a whole shelf of Brewer's and Roget's and Webster's and Garner's and Strunk & White for that, plus computerized tools, these days. Why not have tools for the other aspects of editing? Why not have a computer find a suggestion for you, before you even think to consult a source or scrutinize a passage more closely?
Plus, I guess I don't care much about any sort of purity in the writing process since practically the only accepted style, these days, in English writing at any rate, is fairly rote and prescribed and very simple. Did that sentence seem too complex? Did it have too many clauses? Does your inner editor's voice pipe up while reading it? Yep, exactly—it violates that very-modern style, even if only a bit. May as well take the next step and let a machine enforce those rules.
More generally, as a lover of books and reading and writing, I'm pessimistic about the future of the whole enterprise. I think making a living as a writer, outside the usual handful of trust fund minor-celebrity lit-fic authors, is going to involve a lot of machine assistance, to the point that "writing" will mostly be massaging and curating the output of machines. Ghostwriters beware—and/or get ready to quintuple your output, using new tools, just to keep your head above water. In the meantime, a little help from tools like this might get the last generation of small-time authors, with actual ideas of their own but without an eye for editing, to print, before that becomes all but impossible even for the very-talented.
It's a good thing there's already enough excellent fully-human-produced writing to last even fairly-avid readers several lifetimes. At least until and unless life extension really gets going.
[EDIT] I'm aware, incidentally, that some of these paragraphs disagree with one another. I stand by my contradictions. :-)
As both a writer and an editor, tools like this are essential. Most writing is done in the context of an organization, like a publication or company. Those organizations have style rules. Rules for things like US or UK spelling, for usage questions where there is no single correct answer. Maybe they start with the Chicago Manual of Style, but add custom rules. Maybe it's the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. It's just like a style checker for code. It frees writers and editors from having to worry about details to focus on the important and difficult aspects of writing.
What details? Things like "do you use 's for possessives even for a word/name ending in s, or is it s'?" or "oxford comma or no?". Writers argue over these just like programmers argue over tabs v spaces or the place of braces. Sure, if you're just blogging for personal use, go crazy, don't worry about a consistent style, do what you want. When writing for publication, instead of arguing over whether or not it's ok to use certain slang or contractions, the editors just chose a preferred way.
Tools like Vale streamline the process of aligning to a style, just like coding style checkers and autoformatters relieve programmers of the tedium fixing up all the indentation manually.
I just consider it on the same category as proofreading. Even if you are an super-author you still need someone to pond on it. There's nothing wrong on getting input on your texts by humans why would it be different by machines?
I don't think Vale aims to bring someone that already knows English into mainstream-author territory of writing, but rather help with basic/medium errors that everyday writers do. Or even help people who maybe don't write that often.
I tried running vale with the good-writing plugin on one of my blog posts. I won’t claim I produce great literary works, but a fair bit of warnings it output were false positives. Even conjugates such as “write-only” would trigger its weasel word trigger for “only”.
Ultimately, it is the technical limitations that make the tool unusable for me. On one hand, a Github-flavoured markdown parser is used. It filters out some obscure HTML tags such as `mathp`, and I couldn’t find a way to configure the tool so it would ignore the math segments. I even tried to forgo vale’s built-in markdown converter, and run the check on the output of the static site generator instead, but that plan was quickly foiled by the soft hyphens my generator inserts. Given such an input vale considers every syllable a separate word.
Pretty much every recommendation in the example screenshot is nonsense.
I strongly suggest learning to write better instead of relying on this. There are writing classes. There are teachers. There are editors. And if all of that is too expensive for you, ask friends and colleagues for feedback.
Relying on algorithms to improve your style is at best a no-op, and at worst actively harmful to good writing.
Another thing is to not be afraid rewriting. Usually when I write an essay/paper, I take a short break after the first draft, and then go through, re-read it, and make major changes to the wording/structure in the process. Generally, the first revision is substantially better than the draft, and the second revision is substantially better than the first revision.
There's no law saying that you have to get all of your phrasing and flow perfect the first time around.
Quite the opposite, basically no one gets it exactly right the first time, and if you're trying to you're probably doing it wrong. I forget the attribution but there's a famous quote: "Writing is rewriting."
A post about writing means that I need to plug a couple talks by Larry McEnerney. [1,2]
The tool described in this blog post is all about text-based rules: what the _text_ ought to look like. To improve your own writing (a) learn who your readers are, (b) know what they value, and (c) write so that as readers, they find your work valuable to them.
Just discovered the Vale programming language for the first time thanks to your link - looks pretty interesting. I’ve been meaning to learn a new language that is (a) simple (or if not simple, at least elegant enough to make the lack of simplicity worthwhile) (b) type-safe & performant. I was between Nim & Zig but might need to give Vale a shot.
If you want to improve your writing, even technical writing, I'd recommend reading more books. Classics, sci-fi, whatever floats your boat. Blog posts and news are meant for consuming a point or two in a few paragraphs. Reading a book means really letting a writers style sink into your mind. It'll eventually bleed into your own writing.
This seems interesting, but given that the recommendations in the very first screenshot are >50% “wrong” (“HOW” is not an acronym, “tap” makes no sense in this context), I can only imagine that using this tool would be a huge distraction while writing.
In fact, all the recommendations in the screenshot are wrong or useless. This is the example they chose to showcase the awesomeness of this software? Amazing.
Even something arguably well-executed and compatible with "established" style heuristics, like Grammarly, will always be dubious, as they perpetuate the myth of linguistic prescriptivism weaponized by language pedants. All of whom are annoyingly, vocally, interminably incorrect.
They have rules loaded that are primarily for writing technical documentation. (I assume the tap/touch is from the Google rules). Most technical documentaition style guides will recommend avoiding first person, but that makes zero sense for e.g. a blog post. Assuming ALL CAPS words are likely to be acronyms is also reasonable in such a context.
Vale also has multiple severity levels, so disabling e.g. the "suggestion" (and maybe even "warning") level while writing live would make a lot of sense.
I just learned that my IDE, PhpStorm from Jetbrains, comes bundled with a plugin called Grazie which wraps vale. So you may have been using this and not even realize it.
I'm not the person you asked, but in my case it's mostly a "if it's not broke, don't fix it" situation. I don't need neovim since vim is just fine for me. There are a few neovim-only plugins I wouldn't mind trying out sometime, but I don't need them, and I use very few plugins so they probably wouldn't make the cut for me anyway. And there aren't any neovim-only features I care about (besides mild interest in a few plugins).
That's what most of my personal "resistance" is about. The rest is due to fact that I'm still a little bitter from some bad interactions with some early neovim developers and fans.
Huh never seen this before or managed to forget it exists. Also looks like it does have a VSCode plugin for those of us who don't wanna fight with Vim. Tempted to try it with the write-good linter and see what it says about some of my novel prose.
Tab9 is an ML powered completion engine that works for code and prose. It won't help you write better but it is very good at suggesting word I was about to use next.
Having to provide a configuration file for every little fucking thing and completely refusing to have any set of reasonable defaults when you install a package is the worst part of Neovim.
There is an attempt to build and open source version of Grammarly using vale rules here[1]. Rules are mainly regex based, but some target readability measures[2] or use parts of speech[3].
[1]: https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly
[2]: https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly/blob/master/Openly/Rea...
[3]: https://github.com/errata-ai/vale/issues/356