I do a lot of writing at work. I’m okay, but not exceptional at it. I hedge too much, I’m too verbose, and I favour an enjoyable turn of phrase over absolute clarity.
My other sin is that I love a new toy. I’ve been enjoying the free trial of iaWriter. The editing experience is top tier, and the price tag for the MacOS version is a modest one-off purchase of $49.99. What I really want is a tool that tells me when my writing is bad, and largely, it’s delivered.
iaWriter offers the following annotations:
- Fillers
- Cliches
- Redundancies
- Custom regular expressions
Still, something wasn’t quite sitting well with me. I already use Obsidian for my day to day notes, and VSCode for a lot of other editing. Do I really want to throw another editor into the mix?
I wondered if I could achieve similar results with VSCode. I’d heard that the technical writing team at work make a lot of use of something called Vale. It lints prose in the same way that I’m used to my code editors annotating my code with observed flaws and suggested improvements. On top of that, it’s highly customisable. I don’t know if it’s necessarily more customisable than iaWriter, but it does seem to be customisable in a way that doesn’t need me to be as good at regular expressions.
Here’s what I’ve done:
- I created a new VSCode profile called “Writing.” It has a larger font, and I’ve turned off as many of the visual distractions as I can.
- I installed the “Vale VSCode” extension by Chris Chinchilla.
- I set up my Vale configuration based around some existing style guides and a few of my own bug-bears. You can find my current configuration in my dotfiles repository on GitHub.
- I set the following shell alias:
alias write='code --profile Writing'
My hope is that using VSCode in “writing mode” will guide me towards sharper prose without me having to invest time and money in a whole new editor.
It’s not a perfect solution. Ultimately, this is still a crutch, and it still relies on third party software, but at least this way I can configure my linting rules how I like, and keep them under version control indefinitely. I just hope I spend more time writing and less time endlessly tinkering with Vale configurations.
