write-good VS alex

If you're using markdown, as a shameless plug, ThiefMD supports basic grammar checking, spell check, and English linting (passive voice detection, weasel words).

I like to use write-good[0] - it takes a glob and prints suggestions to stdout.

[0]: https://github.com/btford/write-good

write-good

btford/write-good – A naive linter for English prose.

Like most markdown editors, we have typewriter scrolling, focus mode, and live preview. Code Blocks support syntax highlighting for a majority of languages. We also have a selection of themes and support CSS for export formatting. Some of our secret sauce includes write-good suggestions based on btford's write-good, which we ported to Vala.

This story has been a motivating principle behind my life for a long time, and therefore, whenever I've worked on docs, I've thought about how I could ensure that exclusionary words, even unintentionally, did not make their way into the final copy. During my time at Nexmo, a communications API company, I introduced Alex, an NPM package that helps you identify potentially exclusionary language in your writing, into the CI/CD pipeline for the documentation.

As a philosophy student: Zotero for reference management, the Better BibTeX plugin to auto-generate a .bib file, and two language servers for diagnostics: LTeX for grammar- and spellchecking, and alex for style and sensitivity checking.

When using it as a lib you can pass a markdown string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#markdownvalue-config) or raw text string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#textvalue-config). This will return an object that should contain everything you need to perform a naive replacement.

alex is a lovely command-line tool that takes in text or markdown files and, using retext-equality and retext-profanities, highlights suggestions for improvement. alex checks for gendered work titles, gendered proverbs, ableist language, condescending or intolerant language, profanities, and much more.

Heck, he could even go so far and start using GitHub's automation system (Actions) to run some check on his writing. (Maybe something like alexjs)

alex