3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash." (via) Matt Might in 2010:
The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.
Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.
So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.
In particular, I've created shell scripts for catching three problems:
- abuse of the passive voice,
- weasel words, and
- lexical illusions.
"Lexical illusions" here refers to the thing where you accidentally repeat a word word twice without realizing, which is particularly hard to spot if the repetition spans a line break.
Matt shares Bash scripts that he added to a LaTeX build system to identify these problems.
I pasted his entire article into Claude and asked it to build me an HTML+JavaScript artifact implementing the rules from those scripts. After a couple more iterations (I pasted in some feedback comments from Hacker News) I now have an actually quite useful little web tool:
tools.simonwillison.net/writing-style
Here's the source code and commit history.
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