Elements of writing practice
Elements of writing practice marks your Markdown drafts with rule numbers from the 1918 private printing of The Elements of Style, the way Strunk marked his students’ manuscripts. A red 13 in the margin means “omit needless words” probably applies to that line. It never rewrites your prose, never suggests a replacement, and never gives you a score.
You keep writing in your own editor. In Chrome or Edge, it follows the file and re-marks it every time you save, and the paragraph you just changed becomes the current one.
One tier at a time
The rules come in tiers, in the book’s order: usage first (rules 1 to 5 and the commonly misused words), then composition, then the rules that need judgment. A paragraph with a comma splice shows only that. Once you fix it or dismiss it, the next tier’s marks appear. Paragraphs move through the tiers independently, so a stray comma in the first paragraph doesn’t hide anything in the fifth.
The judgment rules, like “use definite, specific, concrete language,” don’t get marks. They become question cards, on request, for the current paragraph: Strunk’s full text for the rule, your own notes on it, and the questions a careful writer would ask.
Any mark can be dismissed. Strunk allowed that good writers break rules when the sentence gains something in return. A dismissal shows as “stet” in the margin and lasts until you edit that sentence.
More books
Once a paragraph has cleared Strunk, the questions can go on into two other books. Press b and add a pack: 38 figures from Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, or the six principles of Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. Each card summarizes one idea and asks its own questions of your paragraph. The packs hold no text from the books. A pack is a plain JSON file, so you can edit a card or write a pack for another book.
The look
The marks are plain type. A thin red underline sits under the words and the rule number stands in the margin. A red caret shows where a comma is missing, and a blue number with a question mark is a second opinion. The rest of the page is black and gray, so the draft stays the thing you read. A print view double-spaces the draft with the margin marks, for revising at the typewriter.
The whole thing is one HTML file with no build step and no libraries. Your text stays in your browser unless you ask a model of your own choosing for a second opinion.