[segphault]

The main problem with a tool like this it that it needs to understand sentence structure in order to find a lot of common anti-patterns. Without some natural language processing, it's just going to be able to scan for word usage and simple things that you can catch with a regex. You could probably build something a lot more sophisticated on top of something like Apple's NSLinguistic​Tagger and related APIs.

After testing this against a dozen of my blog posts, I'm not terribly impressed with the output. I get more immediate value out of MarkedApp's keyword drawer and word repetition visualization.

[suchow]

You're right, but the problem is much worse than that. Examining 200 entries from Garner's Modern American Usage at random reveals that half of them are easy to implement, the kind of thing that could be assigned as a homework problem (e.g., recognizing that “$10 USD” is redundant, that “very unique” is comparing an uncomparable adjective, or that people from Michigan are called “Michiganders”, not “Michiganites”). Thirty percent are moderately challenging, requiring a week’s effort. Fifteen percent are hard — they are entire projects, requiring advances in AI. And the remaining advice (around five percent), the best kind, is AI-complete. Consider, e.g., "John hit Peter only in the nose". Does this mean that, of all Peter's body parts that could have been hit, John hit only Peter's nose? Or is it a grammatical error that was suppose to convey that, of all the people John could have hit, it was only Peter who he did hit.

We're interested in incorporating deeper NLP. In particular, we've been eyeing https://github.com/spacy-io/spaCy.

[techdragon]

Furthering the complexity of this topic...

While "$10 USD" may be redundant in a newspaper published in the USA, it's immensely useful and arguably preferable when writing blog posts, emails and other text destined for the "World Wide" Web. While USD is commonly used as and many are comfortable with its use as a "common denominator" when pricing something on the Internet, it's still very important to be clear "what dollars do you mean" in this context.

[ghshephard]

If you are going to specify a currency, write USD 10 (though spoken, it's 10 USD).

If the context is explicitly local (such as a local newspaper, menu), then $10 is sufficient in the United States.

[techdragon]

I used to do "10 USD" or "USD 10" until I got sick of hearing responses like

"USD 10 looks weird, why did you do that', or 'that on the pricing page looks funny, can you fix it up a bit'

It seems $ (or the equivalent currency symbol for other currencies) has a place in many peoples minds implying that the number it is next to is currency, and they seem to find it weird when things involving currency are 'written correctly' without the symbol that the numbers mean currency.

[zimpenfish]

> recognizing that “$10 USD” is redundant

People in Australia might disagree. As might people in Bermuda, Colombia, Canada, Hong Kong, Argentina, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#Other_national_currenci...

[0xffff2]

Either "$10" or "10 [USD|AUD|etc]" are correct. It is unequivocally incorrect to use both symbols. use the first when it's clear in context what kind of dollar is being referred to, otherwise use the second.

[zimpenfish]

> It is unequivocally incorrect

That's going to need a citation. To be sure there's plenty of style guides which say "don't do that, do [this other variant instead]" but where's the standard that makes this unequivocal?

[foota]

Also really cool that a library like NSLinguistic​Tagger is included in OSX.

[foota]

Interesting that there's a NBSP in NSLinguistic​Tagger