Angry Reviewer
Stylistic corrector for academic writing and scientific papers. An easy to use web app is hosted at AngryReviewer.com.
The rules used by Angry Reviewer are based on various journal guidelines, articles, books, and lectures on modern academic writing. But, the main source is the book The Craft of Scientific Writing by Michael Alley. The alghorithm knows hundreds of rules, most of which are stylistic. For the spell check you should rely on your text editor and other services.
Running offline version
To run standalone version on your computer, you need to install python 3. Then, just download this repository (you only need two files plocessing.py and rules.py):
git clone https://github.com/anufrievroman/Angry-Reviewer
Put your text into your_text.txt file and run the processing.py file:
python processing.py
The suggestions should be generated in your python console.
Main priciples
- Don't hype. Avoid words like novel, highly, clearly, greatly. Better still, avoid all adverbs.
- Don't use clichés. Avoid overused expressions like holy grail, paradigm shift, in a nutshell.
- Don't use "very" very often. Usually, there is a better word for it.
- Be concise. Avoid phrases like by means of, despite the fact that, in order to.
- Avoid negatives. For example, use "unable" instead of "not able".
- Avoid redundancy. For example, use "investigate" instead of "conduct an investigation of".
- Use active voice. Although not always possible, most of the text should be in active voice.
- Avoid inappropriate language. Keep words like "really, actually, pretty much" for social networks.
- Avoid rare words and latinisms. Non credo all readers know the meaning.
- Keep abbreviations to minimum. Abbreviations are hard to read, consider just spelling it out.
Beside these and many smaller rules, Angry Reviewer checks for typical typographic mistakes like spaces between a number and its units, references to Figures and Supplementary materials, chemical elements, abbreviations. If you supply LaTeX text, it can also check your references for self-citation, overcitation, number of references, length of abstract and title, and other LaTeX specific issues.
Literature
To learn more about the rules used by Angry Reviewer, see the literature:
Books
- The Craft of Scientific Writing by Michael Alley
- On writing well: the classic guide to writing nonfiction by William Zinsser
- Science research writing for non-native speakers of English by Hilary Glasman-Deal
Articles
- Elements of Style - Nature Physics 3, 581 (2007)
- How to Write With Style - Article in Novel Writing Help blog
- The Elements of Style - Collection of rules by Strunk, W., Jr. and White, E.B.
Support
If you like the project, you can buy me a coffee.