How to easily improve the quality of documentation and content

Textlint

Textlint is a pluggable linting tool for text and Markdown. Its open-source utility, written in JavaScript. What does it do?

• Checks validity of the hyperlinks.
• Follows consistent terminology such as “JavaScript” vs “Java​script” or “npm” vs “NPM”.
• Improves linguistic diversity by blocking words like just, easily or simply.
• Indicates when TODO occurs, etc.
• And much more with plugins.

Try Textlint

• Playground
• VS Code extension

Installation and configuration in a project

1. Installation

   npm i -D textlint
   npm i -D textlint-rule-common-misspellings
   npm i -D textlint-rule-no-dead-link
   npm i -D textlint-rule-terminology
   npm i -D textlint-rule-write-good
   

2. Configuration file with rules .textlintrc.yml in the root of the project

   rules:
     terminology: true
     common-misspellings: true
     write-good:
       adverb: false
       passive: false
       tooWordy: false
       weasel: false
     no-dead-link: true
   

3. Set shortcuts in package.json

   "scripts": {
     "text:lint": "textlint *.md",
     "text:fix": "textlint --fix *.md"
   }
   

Execute validation in CLI

npm run text:lint

Execute autocorrections in CLI

npm run text:fix

Proselint

A linter for prose — something like another grammar checker, but focuses on redundancy, jargon, illogicality, falses, sexism, spelling, inconsistencies, oxymorons etc.. It’s written in Python with CLI and web API.

Try Proselint

• Demo editor
• VS Code extension
• and more in GitHub repository

Grammarly®

The most advanced grammar and linguistic tools follow correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery and style guide. Even the free (no paid) version is the most powerful and extremely easy to use. You can set goals for an audience, level of the formality (informal, neutral, formal), domain (academic, business, general. email etc.), tone (neutral, confident, urgent, analytical etc.), intent (inform, describe, tell a story etc.). Corrections show themselves as help with an explanation — one can learn something :-)

Try Grammarly®

• Google Chrome Extension
• Windows App
• Microsoft® Office Extension.

The others

• Ginger — direct competition from Grammarly, its nearly behind them.
• Microsoft® Office — great spelling corrections, but it’s worse with grammar.
• Google Docs — about half worse than MS Office.
• Google Chrome — indicates errors (underlined in red) and grammatical deficiencies (grey underline) in text editing blocks. The proposed options are quite relevant and, most importantly, do not need to install or configure anything.
• SpellCheckPlus — website, average results.
• After the Deadline — site and library for developers, results not very convincing.

Conclusion

There are not many quality, automatic and affordable linting tools (analysis, checking, design and correction) of texts. Picking the right one depends on the use cases. Just choose for the needs from the tools above or try to find something more fitting to your needs :-) Grammarly Premium is my first choice for daily writing and email composition. Textlint becomes my bestie in my web development workflow.