写作方法2016proselint.com
Proselint：英文写作的语法与文风检查工具
Proselint
导读
这篇讨论介绍了一个叫 Proselint 的写作检查工具，评论者从写作者和编辑的角度提出了对自动化写作建议的担忧与期待。值得写作者阅读，因为它促使我们思考工具与创作的关系、写作规则的价值与局限。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
写作时不要盲目套用规则，要理解每条建议背后的原因，否则不如坦诚地犯错，让读者获取真实信息。
- 02
对流行的写作风格建议保持警惕，很多都有争议或错误，包括经典教材，应批判性吸收。
- 03
有意识地保留语言的灵活性和个人风格，规则可以为了表达效果而明智地打破，避免被工具同质化。
- 04
学习写作工具或方法时，重视具体例子和实际练习，而不仅是抽象说明。
HN 评论精选
工具需要提供更多清晰例子，让用户理解它能发现什么问题。
这听起来有趣。作为建设性批评，请把一些例子放在显眼位置。你说它做酷事，那就展示给我看。我翻看各页面只看到一个例子，还不理解：text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables 比较了不可比较的东西：'unique' 不能被比较。这是什么上下文？它会在我的写作中捕获什么错误？这个工具是文本形式的，正适合展示。
IanCal查看英文原文
This sounds interesting. As a bit of constructive criticism, please put some examples high up. You tell me it does cool things. Great, show me. I've looked about on the various pages and can see only one example and I don't understand it: text.md:0:10: wallace.uncomparables Comparison of an uncomparable: 'unique' can not be compared. What's the context of this, what's the error it would have caught in my writing? The tool is in a perfect place to show this off as it's text.
写作风格建议大多有争议或错误，自动化工具可能固化糟糕建议；写作需要理解原因，犯错也是信息。
作为作家和编辑，我很不喜欢这个工具的想法。1. 写作不是编程。编程可以 cargo cult，只要代码运行，不必知道 why/how。写作则不然。如果你不知道 why/how，最好搞砸它让读者去解析，至少他们知道面对的是什么（比如“这家伙是非母语者，我调整接收”或“这家伙对性别歧视语言无知，这是有用信息”）。2. 90% 的写作风格建议要么有争议，要么完全错误。大多数是后者，包括 Strunk & White（网上有很多批判）。我看了 PR 队列，发现热心的程序员从各种来源找风格建议并试图纳入工具。这保证工具会代表一堆来自可疑来源的糟糕写作建议，被无情无知地挥舞。
jonstokes查看英文原文
I'm a writer and editor, and I dislike the idea of this tool quite a bit. 1. Writing isn't coding. In coding, you can do various types of "cargo cult programming" and "copypasta" and what-have-you -- in other words, as long as the code runs you don't necessarily have to know why or how a programming idiom or convention works, or how/why expressing it one way in code is better than expressing it another way in code. This definitionally untrue with writing. If you don't know the why/how of something, then it's better for you to botch it and let the reader attempt to parse it so at least they know what they're dealing with and how to interpret it ("oh, this guy's a non-native speaker, so I'll adjust my reception accordingly" or "ah, this person is kind of clueless about the whole sexist language thing, which is good info for me."). 2. 90% of writing style advice falls into one of two categories: a) hotly debated, and b) totally wrong. Most of it is in the latter category, and this includes Strunk & White (just use google for numerous takedowns of that text). I looked through the PR queue and saw that it consists of eager coders finding style advice from various sources and trying to work that into the tool. That is terrible, terrible, terrible... This will guarantee that the tool will represent a collection of awful writing advice gleaned from dubious sources and wielded with unforgiving ignorance. This tool may be a terrible idea, but the idea of automated prose linting is not terrible. Most beginner to intermediate writers have tics, and as an editor I often have a couple of writer-specific find/replace things I do when I get a new piece from a particular writer (e.g. "this person uses 'however' when she means 'but', and this person overuses these four business jargon terms, etc.). If editors were able to easily compose and execute writer-specific linters from within something like Wordpress, that would probably be pretty great. But this particular command line tool is destined to be either totally unused or massively abused. I'm sorry, I hate to be mean... or, actually, there is a small part of me that enjoys playing Mr. Party Pooper when I see a mob of enthusiastic programmers trying to tie down some great cultural Gulliver with a thousand tiny little automated, black-and-white rules.
担心工具会让语言同质化，规则可以为了艺术表达而打破。
我能看到这类工具的价值，甚至可能自己玩玩，评估是否把建议纳入写作。但同时担心广泛使用会塑造语言，特别是同质化。对我来说，语言的美很大程度在于它的灵活性，明智地打破规则可以创造更艺术和引人入胜的表达，而不是被 lint 的“平淡”散文所能提供的。
rosser查看英文原文
I can see a lot of value for this sort of tool, and might even play with it myself, for sake of evaluating whether or not to incorporate its suggestions into my writing. At the same time, however, I have some wariness that its widespread use could actually have a shaping, and, specifically homogenizing, effect on language. For me, a large part of the beauty of language is how facile it is, how judiciously breaking its rules can create a more artful and compelling means of expression than linted — if you will, "prosaic" — prose seems likely to offer.
缺乏例子和可测试界面会阻碍用户。
这听起来有前途，但我觉得很多潜在用户会因缺乏例子而却步。这绝对需要一个在线界面来试驾。
dcw303查看英文原文
This sounds promising, but I think a lot of potential users would be deterred by the lack of examples. This positively screams for a online interface to test drive.
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