ag91 / writegood-mode

Minor mode for Emacs to improve English writing

Writegood Mode

This is a minor mode to aid in finding common writing problems. Matt Might’s weaselwords scripts inspired this mode.

It highlights text based on a set of weasel-words, passive-voice and duplicate words.

Basic Usage

First, load in the mode.

(add-to-list 'load-path "path/to/writegood-mode")
(require 'writegood-mode)
(global-set-key "\C-cg" 'writegood-mode)

I use the command key above to start the mode when I wish to check my writing.

Alternatively, this package is also available on MELPA. If installed through the package manager, then only the global key customization would be necessary.

Readability tests

There are now two functions to perform Flesch-Kincaid scoring and grade-level estimation. These follow the known algorithms, but may differ from other implementations due to the syllable estimation.

I use these global keys to get to the readability tests:

(global-set-key "\C-c\C-gg" 'writegood-grade-level)
(global-set-key "\C-c\C-ge" 'writegood-reading-ease)

On the fly

There is support for on-the-fly calculation of the reading score. This means that while you are writing you will see your sentences receive a score in the modeline.

There are three events that triggers the on-the-fly calculation:

1. closing a sentence with a ‘.’ character.
2. filling a paragraph (typically done in Emacs with M-q)
3. saving the buffer

These events will trigger the score calculation for the sentence, paragraph and buffer at point respectively.

This feature can be toggled on and off with:

(writegood-on-the-fly-toggle)

Or by pressing M-x writegood-on-the-fly-toggle.

Customization

The user is free to customize three main portions of the mode.

Faces

The three faces used pull from the default warning face and add subtle backgrounds. There is a separate face for each check performed.

• Weasel words (writegood-weasels-face)
• Passive voice (writegood-passive-voice-face)
• Duplicate words (writegood-duplicates-face)

Weasel Words

There is a large list of included weasel words, but you may have your own. See the write-good-weasel-words variable to modify this list.

Passive Voice Irregulars

There is also a list of irregular passive voice verbs. These are the verbs that do not end in ‘ed’ to signify past tense. This variable allow the user to modify the list as needed.

Modes For On The Fly Scoring

One can customize the modes in which the on-the-fly feature should run (for instance may not make sense to check readability scores in a programming mode). The variable to customize is: writegood-on-the-fly-modes.

An example of customization can be:

(add-to-list 'writegood-on-the-fly-modes "some-cool-mode")

By default this is set to:

'("text-mode" "fundamental-mode" "org-mode" "latex-mode" "rst-mode" "markdown-mode" "mu4e-compose-mode")

Alternatives

Artbollocks looks to be an alternative mode to this one.