Hi Mr. Garner,

I'm Jordan Suchow, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley and a fan of your work — in particular, of GMAU, which I was introduced to through David Foster Wallace's review of it. Over the past few months, a friend (Mike Pacer) and I have been working on a software project that I think will interest you. We call it Proselint.

Proselint scans prose for errors in usage and style. Our larger goal is to aggregate knowledge about best practices in writing and to make that knowledge immediately accessible to all authors in the form of a linter for prose. (The term "linter" is borrowed from computer science, where it describes a computer program that scans source code for syntactic and stylistic errors.)

In the process of building Proselint, I implemented several hundred entries from your usage dictionary. Proselint will notice, for example, when you compare an uncomparable adjective, employ the wrong denizen label, use gender-biased language, or use a needless variant of a word. We've also implemented advice from other sources – Steve Pinker, Mary Norris, Philip Corbett, Chuck Palahniuk, among others. Unlike existing tools, which typically focus on school-book grammar and have false-alarm rates so high that their advice can not be trusted, we started where you did: with redundancy, jargon, illogic, clichés, sexism, misspelling, inconsistency, symbol misuse, malaproprisms, oxymorons, hedging, apologizing, pretension, and more. This has made it possible to create a tool that is fast and precise. Better to be quiet and authoritative than loud and unreliable. We habitually test our tool against writing from well-edited books and literary magazines, where it is mostly silent, but sometimes has useful things to say.

We'd like your permission to use your advice in our tool. Can we? This would be less an endorsement than permission to attribute your ideas to you. Consider, for example, when we catch someone writing "Hong Kongian". We want to tell them that the preferred form is "Hong Konger", that you are the source of this advice, and that they can find more information by following a provided citation/link to the corresponding entry in your usage guide.

You can read a bit more about Proselint in an (unreleased) site that introduces it, http://prose.lifelinter.com/.

All the best,
Jordan

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