Today I discovered a nice tool for improving your scientific writing: Neil Spring’s style-check.rb. In a primitive but effective way (and aware of LaTeX markup!), it checks your document for the occurrence of typical style or syntax errors. These are implemented as a configurable list of regular expressions. style-check.rb reports any encountered errors like a compiler, with line and column number, according to the developer’s philosophy that writing is just a special case of coding. When executing the script manually, its output is somewhat hard to “process” for a human, so I thought, why not integrate it into Emacs. Emacs is prepared for dealing with compiler output, so the solution was straightforward:
(defun style-check-file () (interactive) (compile (format "style-check.rb -v %s" (buffer-file-name))))
In the same run, I should also recommend another tool, which finds different errors, and overall less of them, but integrates into Emacs even more conveniently: Benjamin Beckwith’s writegood-mode. I recommend binding it to C-c g:
(require 'writegood-mode) (global-set-key [(control c) ?g] 'writegood-mode)
For those who don’t use Emacs, there is also the possibility to use Matt Might’s standalone “weaselwords” script, which gave the inspiration for writegood-mode.
Tags: emacs, howto, scientific, style, writing