DamienCassou/textlint — Issue #18: Feedback from native speaker
Author: DamienCassou
Created: 2012-02-05 13:04:21+00:00
State: open

Some feedback from Daniel Sykes:

I had a quick go with TextLint, first with my writing and then the deliverable. Overall I would say it's a little sensitive. Perhaps each item of feedback could have a severity rating?

Wrong everywhere and always: "allow to"
Wrong in formal/scientific language: Contractions like "I'll"
Undesirable: Long sentences
Undesirable in papers: "not"
Personal choice: "in order to", Oxford comma

I noticed there is some feedback specifically for German speakers. Are there any for Latin speakers? There are some mistakes I notice very often, for example: putting a comma after the subject in a sentence, putting plurals within compound nouns, and compound nouns of excessive length.

A couple of mistakes in the feedback:

- "After 'an' only words beginning with a vowel are allowed
'an NS'"
This is only half true. 'An' is also used for acronyms that start with a vowel sound. So 'an NS' is correct because it is pronounced 'an enn-ess'. Conversely 'a URI' is correct because it's pronounced 'a yoo-arr-eye'.

- "Use a comma after the next-to-last item in a series of three or more elements"
This is known as the Oxford comma and is really optional.

And finally, about the passive voice, I would say the guidelines are quite subtle. In fact one "should" write (scientifically) in passive voice, but this leads to various problems: (1) it's hard to read; (2) it's not clear what the authors actually did (sometimes this is an advantage). On the other hand, writing completely in active voice is absolutely wrong. If one writes mostly in active voice it sounds incredibly childish to an English person. The ideal is a mix of both, with the active voice making clear what work was done by the authors.