I question how useful a tool like this is for a skilled writer.
Prose isn't code.
Many key elements of good writing are based around the idea of knowing the rules, and then carefully breaking them.
Prose isn't code.
Many key elements of good writing are based around the idea of knowing the rules, and then carefully breaking them.
I was writing some C earlier and my linter warned me about "incrementing a void pointer". However, I understood the context better than my linter, knew that I'd be compiling with gcc (which allows void pointer arithmetic), so I ignored the warning and carried on. My code compiled and ran nicely.
When it comes to static analysis, I think (creative) writers, like programmers, wouldn't care about warnings. This is already true of spell-checkers (e.g. my letter-writing character is English, but my text-editor's yelling about "colour").
I was referring to a hypothetical American creative writer, writing a scene in which a British character writes a letter. In this hypothetical work, written in US English, there would then be a section of text that used UK English spellings. The naive spell-checker would not understand the context, and would flag these as misspellings.
This was meant to be analogous to my "incrementing a void pointer" example; the static analysis tool produces warnings which the author knows to ignore. In the C programming case, my function was passed the size of the objects comprising the array pointed to by the void pointer, so the linter was wrong to tell me I was making a mistake. Similarly, the spell-checker was wrong to say "change this instance of 'colour' to 'color'".
Similar considerations apply to prose linters.
Polonius would be a lesser character if shed of cliches, and a good writer would know to ignore the linter's opinions on the matter.
For a skilled writer who takes time to write "proper" prose, probably not very useful.
But for me, as a non-native english speaker who writes a lot of short english texts (emails, documentation, HN comments and so on), it could probably help.
For example, since I write both US and British English every day, a consistency warning is certainly helpful. I would also like a linter to help the flow of text, for example by pointing out when you aren't mixing up your sentence lengths in a good way. Oh, in that last sentence I accidentally missed that I used first person in the sentence before that! A linter as a chrome plugin would have pointed that out.
I can imagine a tool like this making it much easier for journalists to follow a newspaper's style guide or something similar.
My impression of this might have been different if the list of rules included CMOS instead of something that tells me not to use the term "jump the gun" because it's a cliche.
That said, I think there's a better way to approach this. Rather than linting based on a list of rules, I'd prefer a more technical approach that highlighted actual issues, such as garden path sentences, ambiguous pronouns, doubled words, etc.