Style-Scanner

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h1. Style-Scanner

Style-Scanner, written by Jack Kinsella ("blog":http://www.jackkinsella.ie), helps you improve your English language writing. Based on stylistic advice given by authors such as Skrunk and White, Bill Bryson and George Orwell, Style-Scanner scans your text and markup files then lists issues found. Currently it spots the following problems:

• Use of 600 different clichés He pushed the envelope
• Use of 11 different forms of passive tense. The letter was sent
• Broken links http://www.thiswebsite404s.com
• Ugly words The government utilized the resources.
• Speaking in generalities Many people think that
• Useless words It was a very fast app.
• Repeating the same non structural word within a sentence Trask makes an excellent point, forcefully and with taste, in his excellent work 'Mind The Gaffe'
• Using latin abbreviations within your text E.g.
• Spelling mistakes addd
• Repeating the same word consecutively We went to the the shopping centre.
• Excess white space We went to the shopping centre.
• Capitalization Problems On monday we will have an exam.

Linguistic analysis is a hard problem, so you cannot expect perfect results. Think of Style-Scanner as guidelines to alert you of possible faults. *Remember at best prescriptive stylistic guides can bring you up to a B minus standard of writing. * Anything more is beyond the scope of this tool.

h2. Installation

Install Style-Scanner using Ruby gems:

@gem install style-scanner@

Next install Hunspell, an open source spell-checker that Style-Scanner depends upon.

@brew install hunspell@

h2. Usage

Style-Scanner is command line only. Cd into the directory with the files you'd like to scan, then type

@style-scanner filename@

After a few seconds Style-Scanner will print a list problems it finds.

Style-Scanner is pipe friendly.

@cat filename | style-scanner@

See all command line options

@style-scanner -h@

By default some scans, such as the Adverb scan, are turned off. Use command line options to enable them.

@style-scanner -a filename@ #scan for adverbs

Scan HTML files @style-scanner filename.html --help@

Scan Textile files @style-scanner filename.html -t@

h2. Dependencies

h3. Gems

"punkt-segmenter":https://github.com/lfcipriani/punkt-segmenter Splits text into sentences.

"colorize":https://github.com/fazibear/colorize Formats terminal output in red,green and other colours.

"entagger":http://engtagger.rubyforge.org/ Assigns parts of speech tags to English text based on a lookup dictionary and a set of probability values.

"RedCloth":http://redcloth.org/ Converts Textile to HTML

"Sanitize":https://github.com/rgrove/sanitize Converts HTML to plain text

h3. Other

"Hunspell":http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/ An open source spell checker used by Open Office, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

h2. Contributing

Contribution is welcomed and encouraged, although no modifications will be accepted if they are not accompanied by passing tests.

h3. Parts of Speech

| Tag | Part Of Speech | Examples | |CC | Conjunction, coordinating | and, or | | CD | Adjective, cardinal number | 3, fifteen | | DET | Determiner | this, each, some | |EX| Pronoun, existential there |there | |FW| Foreign words || |IN| Preposition / Conjunction |for, of, although, that | |JJ| Adjective |happy, bad | |JJR| Adjective, comparative | happier, worse | |JJS| Adjective, superlative | happiest, worst | |LS| Symbol, list item |A, A. | |MD| Verb, modal |can, could, 'll | |NN| Noun |aircraft, data | |NNP| Noun, proper | London, Michael | |NNPS| Noun, proper, plural | Australians, Methodists | |NNS| Noun, plural | women, books | |PDT| Determiner, prequalifier | quite, all, half | |POS| Possessive | 's, ' | |PRP| Determiner, possessive second | mine, yours | |PRPS| Determiner, possessive | their, your | |RB| Adverb |often, not, very, here | |RBR| Adverb, comparative | faster | |RBS| Adverb, superlative | fastest | |RP| Adverb, particle |up, off, out | |SYM| Symbol | * | |TO| Preposition |to | |UH| Interjection |oh, yes, mmm | |VB| Verb, infinitive |take, live | |VBD| Verb, past tense | took, lived | |VBG| Verb, gerund | taking, living | |VBN| Verb, past/passive participle | taken, lived | |VBP| Verb, base present form | take, live | |VBZ| Verb, present 3SG -s form | takes, lives | |WDT| Determiner, question | which, whatever | |WP| Pronoun, question |who, whoever | |WPS| Determiner, possessive & question | whose | |WRB| Adverb, question | when, how, however | |PP| Punctuation, sentence ender |., !, ? | |PPC| Punctuation, comma | , | |PPD| Punctuation, dollar sign | $ | |PPL| Punctuation, quotation mark left | `` | |PPR| Punctuation, quotation mark right | '' | |PPS| Punctuation, colon, semicolon, elipsis| :, ..., - | |LRB| Punctuation, left bracket | (, {, [ | |RRB| Punctuation, right bracket | ), }, ] |

h2. Roadmap

1 Add more acronyms 2 Refactor the collection methods. 4 More useless words. 5 Troublesome words from Stunk. 8 Tense switches 9 Improve tests by: a Creating a sentence helper b Making a better Rspec matcher (more informative erros) c Automatically detecting the correct problem 10 Desktop app 11 Globalize spell check 12 Most overused words 13 Suggestions for synonyms 14 Code overview screencast

h2. Contributors

Jack Kinsella Robert Dooley, developer in Galway Western, Ireland

h2. Licence

Style-Scanner is released under the "MIT license":www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT Copyright "Jack Kinsella":www.jackkinsella.ie