Nitpicker – an overly picky language style checker | Hacker News Reader

Nitpicker – an overly picky language style checker

nitpickertool.com

60 pointsSami_Lehtinen41 comments

The interface is a little confusing when you write a "perfect" text. I just wrote a few sentences, pressed "Analyze" and nothing at all happened. Pressed it again, nothing again. Maybe include a message like "Sorry, found nothing to nitpick about."

There was a problem with the server. It should work now.

I've just tried it with:

I tried it on some decent-looking HN comments. I am impressed that every "problem" it has found has been plausible, but disappointed that all have been wrong. This checker has one hell of a false positive rate.

No errors / suggestions. I didn't get any feedback that the text has been analyzed and is ok.

(I tried it with the original text and got some suggestions. It's working.)

No, I don't think this is a server problem, it's a UI problem: If there is no mistake, there is no visible feedback. Which makes it hard to tell the difference between being an awesome writer and seeing a broken website.

I tried it on some decent-looking HN comments. I'm impressed that every "problem" it has found has been plausible, but disappointed that all of them have been wrong. This thing has one hell of a false positive rate.

Not to nitpick but you should not use informal contractions. (I'm)

Omit the 'of' after 'all' unless you change the meaning of the sentence. (all of)

You should avoid using 'thing' - instead, name the entities under discussion.

Natural language processing is hard.

> Omit the 'of' after 'all' unless you change the meaning of the sentence. (all of)

You mean like this?

"(...) but disappointed that all them have been wrong (...)"

Really? I'm not a native speaker, but that doesn't look right.

No, like this: "(...) but disappointed that all have been wrong (...)"

As non-native speakers (I'm one too), we have a tendency to use English inelegantly and stuff too many words in sentences.

Those extra words can help a sentence flow better. If elegance in language were simply a matter of maximal compression while following a set of grammatical rules, then writing would be a lot easier than it actually is.

Elegance in language is not about using the fewest words that still follow grammatical rules. It's using as few words as possible while following all grammatical rules, having good flow, a good sound and the right emotional meaning.

That's why good writing takes effort.

> Not to nitpick but you should not use informal contractions. (I'm)

I disagree -- and who are you to say otherwise?

> Omit the 'of' after 'all' unless you change the meaning of the sentence. (all of)

If I said "all have been wrong", it would have been a bit more difficult to tell what that part of the sentence was referring to; "all of them have been wrong" includes a bit of helpful linguistic redundancy.

> You should avoid using 'thing' - instead, name the entities under discussion.

Again, this phrasing was done for stylistic reasons. "This thing" fits well in tone with "one hell of a".

Just to clarify; I simply ran your post through the nitpickertool and posted its corrections as a reply. I agree with you that none of the corrections should be applied. I just found it humorous at the time I wrote my comment.

I used the word "Premise," which is apparently British, and therefore wrong.

    Avoid using British English. (replace with *Premize*)

Premize?

Wow, that's a hell of a false positive. "Premize" isn't even in the dictionary. It must be a general pattern-matching rule for things like realise vs realize.

Why would you want to avoid using real english? That's just silly.

You know what's silly? Calling one version of English "real English" is silly. I think what you were trying to say is "British English". And I agree, why would you want to avoid using it?

It's ironic that the description has a language style error:

"Nitpicker is a language style checker which compares your text ..."

s/which/that/

It doesn't seem to notice punctuation errors, either.

Hm, really? I think I agree that "that" is better here, but I'm not yet convinced that "which" doesn't also work.

If we truncate the sentence to "Nitpicker is a language style checker," it is still a true statement, which to me indicates that perhaps "which compares your text" is a descriptive rather than restrictive phrase.

In American English, "which" is supposed to be non-restrictive if not followed by a preposition. At least if I remember it correctly. (I'm a Slavic person speaking an L2 English interlanguage, not native English, so I may be wrong.)

Also, it seems to be a nice example of something that would require a substantial level of natural language understanding from the style checker in order to be detectable (or, as is the current fashion, at least a really substantial body of statistical data).

But shouldn't a non-restrictive relative clause be enclosed by commas?

Great idea although it doesn't appear to pick up the misuse of there, their and they're.

I typed "I'm going to walk over their" and Nitpicker only told me that " I'm " is an informal contraction.

Overly picky, at the cost of comprehensiveness I would assume. :)

I might enjoy using this service if it was offered as a browser extension, since I find myself regularly proofing my writing to eradicate the informal language that I tend to use in my first drafts.

Where's the code?

I'd like to look at how you implemented this, and maybe at the rule db.

This would be a great thing to have in offline software as a library.

This would be awesome as an Emacs minor mode...

This was posted 5 months ago.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985662

Mac - Chrome browser I pressed Analyze and nothing happened o.O

Loved the idea, but the in first few test paragraphs I tried, the only results I got were false positives.

overly picky!

Curbs artistic freedom, and nitpicks style instead of focusing on grammar issues/ ambiguity.

They seem fairly self-aware of this. It is called 'nitpicker'

Rather tangential to the point of individual artistic freedom, but still rather related to artistic deviation in general (didn't think this worthy of a top-level comment - so it's got little to do with you, sorry): I don't trust prescriptionism without any awareness of context. I'm sure there a quite a few nitpickers who take pride in recognizing historical veins in modernist poetry when it's being spouted at them and hot-swapping in the right tropes as required.

Interesting, it seems to have a way to go to match the quality of feedback that http://www.afterthedeadline.com/ gives though.

The first thing I did was run the website copy through it. It picked up a few problems such as the use of the passive voice. A demonstration perhaps to not take the results at face value.

At this late hour I made a note to comment on this in the morning, when I could make my thoughts more succinct. I then realized the inherent irony in that action.

I love this tool.

I like it, it does exactly the kind of "thinking" my brain doesn't want to.

Disappointed that it doesn't correct "The NSA" to "NSA".

or "The NSA" AKA "Nobody" as in "Nobody is listening"

Pretty cool. I would love to have something like this in Sublime.

yeah, did not seem to work for me. xubuntu, chrome 27.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com