A naive linter for English prose that helps developers improve their writing by detecting common style issues.
Write Good is a naive linter for English prose that helps developers improve their writing by detecting common style issues like passive voice, weasel words, and clichés. It provides actionable suggestions to make technical documentation, comments, and other text clearer and more effective. The tool is designed to be lightweight, customizable, and easy to integrate into development workflows.
Developers, technical writers, and anyone who writes English prose in a technical context and wants to improve clarity and style.
Developers choose Write Good for its simplicity, focus on common technical writing pitfalls, and flexibility—it can be used as a library, CLI tool, or via extensions, and it avoids being overly prescriptive while providing useful feedback.
Naive linter for English prose
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Easy to install via npm and use as a CLI or library with minimal setup, making it quick to integrate into development workflows for linting markdown or text files.
Targets common pitfalls in developer documentation, such as passive voice and weasel words, based on researched style guides like the Elements of Style.
Allows disabling specific checks, whitelisting terms, and adding custom rules via extensions, as demonstrated with the German extension schreib-gut.
Encourages thoughtful application of suggestions rather than dogmatic enforcement, aligning with its philosophy to avoid overly rigid style policing.
Only checks for specific style issues and admits to being 'naive'; it lacks advanced grammar, spelling, or contextual analysis compared to tools like Grammarly or LanguageTool.
Despite supporting custom checks, the README lists only one third-party extension (for German), indicating a small community and limited support for languages or niche use cases.
Returns suggestions as simple arrays with index and offset, which may require additional processing for rich, user-friendly displays or seamless integration into complex editing environments.
write-good is an open-source alternative to the following products:
Grammarly is a writing assistant tool that provides grammar checking, spell checking, and style suggestions across various platforms.
A web-based writing tool that analyzes text for readability, highlighting complex sentences, adverbs, passive voice, and suggesting simpler alternatives.