Naive linter for English prose for developers who can't write good and wanna do other stuff good too.

npm install write-good

writeGood is a function that takes a string and returns an array of suggestions.

var writeGood = require('write-good');

var suggestions = writeGood('So the cat was stolen.');

// suggestions:
//
// [{
//   suggestion: "omit 'So' from the beginning of sentences",
//   index: 0, offset: 2
// }, {
//   suggestion: "'was stolen' is passive voice",
//   index: 11, offset: 10
// }]

writeGood takes an optional second argument that allows you to disable certain checks.

You can disable checking for passive voice like this:

var writeGood = require('write-good');

var suggestions = writeGood('So the cat was stolen', { passive: false});
// suggestions: []

You can use write-good as a command-line tool by installing it globally:

npm install -g write-good

write-good takes a glob and prints suggestions to stdout:

$ write-good *.md

In README.md
=============
 = writeGood('So the cat was stolen.');
                         ^^^^^^^^^^
"was stolen" is passive voice on line 20 at column 40
-------------
//   suggestion: "'was stolen' is passive voice",
                   ^^^^^^^^^^
"was stolen" is passive voice on line 28 at column 19

You can run just specific checks like this:

write-good *.md --weasel --so

Or exclude checks like this:

write-good *.md --no-passive

You can disable any combination of the following by providing a key with value false as the second argument to writeGood.

Checks for passive voice.

Checks for lexical illusions – cases where a word is repeated.

Checks for so at the beginning of the sentence.

Checks for "weasel words."

I came across these resources while doing research to make this module. They might be helpful.

• shell script for avoiding "weasel words" – I based my initial implementation on this
• Academic Writing Check – a perl script similar to above
• writegood mode for emacs
• natural – general purpose NLP toolkit in JavaScript
• WordNet – lexical database of the English language

• Elements of Style
• Flesch–Kincaid readability
• Fear and Loathing of the English passive

This is not an endorsement. These apps have similar functionality that you may find useful.

• Hemingway App
• Nitpicker

MIT