I rushed through that post about logging money in Org mode and didn’t take much time to edit it. This bothers me. Today I went into writegood-mode
to catch my sloppiest writing mistakes.
NOTE
Vim users may want to look at
vim-wordy
, a plugin with similar goals towritegood-mode
.
writegood-mode
writegood-mode
is a minor Emacs mode which highlights troublesome patterns in your writing. It looks for three patterns:
- weasel words
- a set of adverbs that add no meaning to the words they modify
- passive voice
- sentences where the subject receives an action rather than performing it. Read this bit about passive voice. They explain it better.
- duplicated words
- “the the” is a common writing mistake, unless you’re talking about the band
writegood-mode
used a collection of bash scripts by Matt Might for inspiration.
Installing And Using It
Use the Emacs package manager to install writegood-mode
.
M-x package-install writegood-mode
Enable it at any time with M-x writegood-mode
. The documentation suggests you set a global command key to start writegood-mode
more quickly, so I added that to init.el
.
Adding a Hook
I must confess something to you. I installed writegood-mode
months ago. I never remember to manually load it. Maybe add a hook to load it?
This ensures that at least Markdown blog posts are automatically checked.
Customizing Your Weasel Words
writegood-weasel-words
contains a good starter collection of words and phrases to avoid. You can replace or extend this list with your own preferences.
Today I just take the take the original list as-is and add my own list of weasel words. -concat
from dash.el
returns the result of concatenating two lists into a single list.
NOTE
dash.el
is an Emacs utility library that adds functions for examining and manipulating lists.Have fun!
Readability Tests
writegood-mode
provides readability tests based on Flesch-Kincaid.
Test | Score |
---|---|
Flesch-Kincaid grade level score | 4.98 |
Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score | 77.68 |
I write simply when possible, so these numbers please me. Readers can find highly technical writing at other sites.
That’s It
Professional writers have professional editors. The rest of us do not. A tool like writegood-mode
cannot replace a professional editor. However, by highlighting common patterns of lazy writing, it can help us pay attention to our words while we write them.
Excuse me. I need to edit that other post.
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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01