My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)

[ergotux]

Two resources which helped me improving my writing, when I was writing my thesis were "How to Write Mathematics" by Paul R. Halmos and "Mathematical Writing" by Donald E. Knuth et al. I would always start with Halmos to get into the spirit of perusing clear and precise communication. The "Bad/Better/OK" suggestions especially reminded me of the discussions in the lecture notes from Knuth et al. And at a third step a linter such as the proposed one is probably helpful, if something slips through.

I think these resources are essential for anyone who writes on any subject which at least involves definitions here and there.

[techas]

I second those recommendations and add one: The Craft of Scientific Writing by M. Alley.

[nazka]

If anybody likes this article and wants to know more about the process of writing effective PhD papers they should watch [1]. In fact, anybody who desires to improve their communication skills should watch it. It is so good that I would have paid to have access to this video!

[1] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM

[3abiton]

I wish there was a repo of "all the things you need to know when starting a PhD", include the famous phd grind.

[quickgist]

I find myself disagreeing with many of the examples. E.g. according to the article:

Bad: It is quite difficult to find untainted samples. Better: It is difficult to find untainted samples.

Bad: We used various methods to isolate four samples. Better: We isolated four samples.

Something being quite difficult reads significantly differently than just being difficult. You haven't made the sentence better, you've changed the meaning.

And the fact that you used various methods instead of a single method is information missing from the second sentence.

[dspillett]

> Something being quite difficult reads significantly differently than just being difficult. You haven't made the sentence better, you've changed the meaning.

The problem there is that the meaning quite carries can vary significantly depending on the reader or the context where the word is read (so it can read differently depending on how previous sentences have primed the reader, which means the same person might read it differently with that context than if they start at that sentence. Quite differently, in fact!

This is because in spoken form the word changes a lot with tone of voice. Technically "quite difficult" means "slightly difficult" but in many places actually means "damn near impossible".

I'd day that while removing the word isn't wrong, replacing it with a more specific comparison would be better.

[t8sr]

And this is why I now have to read 30 page design docs that could have been 3 pages and said the same thing.

Please try to understand why people have such strong dislike of floral writing, especially in technical texts. If you read a lot of papers or designs, it makes your life miserable.

[seanhunter]

Strong disagree. If you want to make a point about using different methods, say what you did.

“We isolated four samples using the following methods…”

[zaptheimpaler]

Yeah most of his examples looked terrible to me. It's actually part of why reading papers is so damn difficult even when the paper says something simple. They're obsessed with this stilted formal tone that no one actually likes and leaves out subtle but important context clues.

[mooreds]

If you are looking for more of this, check out vale.sh. It lets you add all kinds of style guidelines, including avoiding weasel words.

Here's the GH action we use to run vale on our website at PR time: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-site/blob/main/.git...

and our config: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-site/tree/main/conf...

We've found it helpful to enforce style but probably aren't using it to the full extent.

[codazoda]

Vale.sh looks pretty good, thanks for the reference.

I’m currently editing the third edition of my book and a bunch of articles for my website. This will come in handy.

[simonw]

I got Claude to port those Bash scripts to a web UI so I could paste code directly into it and see what came out: https://tools.simonwillison.net/writing-style

Claude transcript here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e9902ed1cbda30f90db8d0d22caa0...

[bmacho]

I don't think it is working properly. The second(?) pattern match is bad. For example, for

    It is quite difficult to find untainted samples. We used various methods to isolate four samples.

it gives

    Found "quite" in: "is quite difficult to find untainted samples."
    Found "various" in: ""

Otherwise great work, I like these very fast html/js tools.

[DonHopkins]

Why not just use Claude itself to review the writing, instead of having it write a much less capable and brittle and limited bash script to do it? You could even ask Claude to write a prompt for itself that performs the same or better function than the bash script. Bash and Perl are like duct tape and chewing gum, so terrible for that kind of stuff, and it's just what Claude does best. It can go so much further by actually weighing alternatives and suggesting changes, instead of just flagging problems. And no weird regular expression inconsistencies that cause false positives and negatives and parsing errors.

[emmelaich]

diction and style commands were present in early Unix, which did similar jobs.

You can get them (or versions of them) from GNU. They're in homebrew.

https://www.gnu.org/software/diction/

From what I remember, they weren't great; this bunch of programs probably does just as well.

[Gimpei]

In my field, writing quality was on the very lowest rung of importance, below even teaching evaluations. As much as I value clear, concise prose, I’d say a grad student would be better served working on public speaking especially when faced with hostile questioning, and, sadly, with brown-nosing. Yes I am bitter :p

[kjkjadksj]

I think even more than public speaking is just seeking a therapist. People get in over their head but its by their own doing. The stakes are never as high as you have built them up in your head. People want you to pass.

[disconcision]

how can you tell? likely this is field-dependent but even if because reviewers dont tend to comment on writing quality it doesnt mean it doesnt play a factor in acceptance. if you annoy people, (sometimes even especially) in ways that dont feel substantive enough to merit mentioning in a review, it can make them more inclined to be critical about aspects they might otherwise gloss over.

(i acknowledge this is unsatisfyingly unfalsifiable, and that it can also go the other way, in that selectively bad writing can be used to attempt to paper over holes)

[liontwist]

> To market a paper, the author must make a compelling case for why her idea deserves access to that resource.

In other words, journals are filled with papers that were sold the best, not the most important ideas. And as the author also says, superficial things like hard to detect typos are often a deciding factor because the reviewers can detect them.

we should stop pretending there is objectivity and embrace journals that reflect taste and opinion of the editor.

Or have standard places like arxiv for publishing everything. There is no scarce resource for uploading pdfs.

[kjkjadksj]

The editor is not the one making the call really. Its the reviewers. If they give it few marks or no marks then that’s it, its published. If they dog that paper down then the editor has to sit up in their chair and actually decide whether or not the authors made sufficient change to address the reviewers complaints. But even then its still the reviewers who are demanding the standard, not the editors.

[aeonik]

While we're at, improve the citation system, so I the references become hyperlinks, and code artifacts can be accessed.

[nonrandomstring]

Useful for those who, for some unfathomable reason, don't use emacs.

Might be hard to get into a good workflow as running them and then re-editing seems tedious.

Author gives credit to emacs "writegood", but my all-time fave style-nazi plugin is "artbollocks-mode".

[dang]

Related:

Shell scripts to improve your writing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295530 - Jan 2017 (55 comments)

Shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My advisor rewrote himself in bash." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529166 - July 2010 (31 comments)

[tgraf_80]

Good intentions, indeed. Creating lots of steering committee slides, I know about the wish from the audience of a simpler language. But ‘very close’ is different from ‘close’. It’s not just salt and pepper but trying to articulate a complex and nuanced reality. And yes, research papers then sound a bit less solid and complete- sorry, but often this is the reality you should not hide.

[jimbokun]

> But ‘very close’ is different from ‘close’.

What's the difference?

[gmac]

Can confirm the value of checking for repeated words such as ‘the the’. This is the final example I give my Econ PhD students in a session on RegExps: https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~gm268/iphd/regexps/regexps.pdf

[skalarproduktr]

This is a great summary how to use regexps, complete with some very nice examples. Thank you!

[ninalanyon]

Just so long as it doesn't blindly modify "that that".

[ofalkaed]

As a humanities sort I appreciate this but the scripts sort of go against the general thrust of the text since the scripts can not understand context or semantics, it feels like they would push many towards blindly following prescription instead of what he is advocating for. I think elaboration would have served better than bad, better and good examples which do not explain the issues and assume the reader will intuitively understand. We get some elaboration but not enough.

Gardner's Modern English Grammar should also be the primary recommendation for further reading, Gardner has a gift for explaining the nuances of these things. Style guides are guides for the style of a given publication or writing within a discipline, not guides on writing well or with style.

[jimbokun]

Yes, I think the tool should highlight usages to double check, not blindly apply changes and submit.

[0xbadcafebee]

Put "AI" in the name and sell it for $5M?

[anonymousDan]

I found this an interesting read: https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/readers-brain

It gives a neuroscience perspective on what makes certain writing styles clearer.

[65]

    I'd even go so far as to say that the removal of all adverbs from any technical writing would be a net positive for my newest graduate students.

I've heard this before. Stephen King hates adverbs. However, it can be very difficult to remove all adverbs from your writing. "randomly" for example is an adverb, and if your sentence uses it, it can be difficult to rewrite the sentence without "randomly" that isn't long and complicated. Many adverbs are emphasis words that don't need to be in the sentence ("extremely" for example), but other adverbs are critical to the sentence.

[saghm]

I only heard the recommendation to completely avoid adverbs for the first time the other day, although in the context of creative writing rather than technical. I think there's validity to trying to define a uniform style without fluff for technical writing, but I can't help but think that trying to studiously follow personal stylistic decisions of famous try to improve as a writer won't usually end up with something particularly original. Does anyone think that Stephen King got where he is today by just blindly following idiosyncrasies from writers who came before him rather than developing his own style?

[teekert]

This what Claude/Chat do when you ask them to make text more concise.

Have to say, Chat does produce what I am looking for in one go more often. Claude always makes lists or makes things way to concise. Maybe I need other prompts.

[tetris11]

duplicate words:

    sed -z -r 's|(\b[^ ]+\b)(\1)+|~Dupe!\1~|g'

[lupire]

The script appears to be missing a check for "long series of single-sentencr paragraphs", which quite harms readability.

[barrettondricka]

I use a version of these scripts all the time.

though all-in-one spell-checkers like vale.sh are more convenient.