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btford / write-good

Naive linter for English prose
MIT License
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Hidden Verbs #38

Open MichaelCarychao opened 9 years ago

MichaelCarychao commented 9 years ago

How about catching hidden verbs? Some word endings that flag verbs hiding as nouns: ment, ion, ance, ence.

RichardLitt commented 9 years ago

Sounds interesting. Want to make a module for it and we'll see how it looks?

fguerrer77 commented 9 years ago

Will see

RichardLitt commented 9 years ago

@MichaelCarychao Can you provide more examples, too?

MichaelCarychao commented 9 years ago

Cool to see your interest. Here's a solid explanation of hidden verbs from PlainLanguage.gov:

A hidden verb is a verb converted into a noun. It often needs an extra verb to make sense. So we write, "Please make an application for a personal loan" rather than "Please apply for a personal loan."

Hidden verbs come in two forms. Some have endings such as -ment, -tion, -sion, and -ance or link with verbs such as achieve, effect, give , have, make, reach, and take. Often, you will find a hidden verb between the words "the" and "of." http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/wordsuggestions/hiddenverbs.cfm

On Wednesday, March 11, 2015, Richard Littauer notifications@github.com wrote:

@MichaelCarychao https://github.com/MichaelCarychao Can you provide more examples, too?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/btford/write-good/issues/38#issuecomment-78394729.

ndarville commented 9 years ago

You’ll want to detect “nominal suffixes”, ie suffixes turning verbs to nouns. There’re a bunch of examples in the link.

I don’t know how to write a linter without false positives, though, since a lot of adverbs and normal nouns will be flagged as well. Writing a dedicated dictionary seems overkill—and add to this that nounified verbs aren’t necessarily bad; perfectly useful words like “invitation” would be flagged, for instance.

And you could also go the other way around and detect verbifications.

And let’s not get started on hidden adjectives ... :)