As mentioned in a previous phlog-entry, I recently been on some writing courses
as part of my PhD. In one of the courses, the instructor linked to a document I
found intriguing: It's a collection of common stylistic choices for writers[0]. It
covers things like British vs. American spelling, which dashes to use (spaced
en-dashes vs. unspaced em-dashes), how to format dates and so on. It's not a
complete list by any means, but it makes for a good checklist to help authors
write consistently. Seeing as I am in the process of writing my PhD thesis, I
immediately wanted to settle on some standards for my writing, write them down
for myself and others to see, and somehow make sure that I follow them.

This reminded of the linters and style-checkers that are common in the
programming world. Perhaps it would be possible to apply some of the same
techniques to regular text?

I imagine a setup in which my git-repository contains a file at the root,
containing an machine- and human-readable description of the stylistic choices
of the author. Something like:

  spelling: uk
  serial-commas: yes
  ...

That would be sufficient at first, but at some point of course we would like to
automate checking whether some files (.tex, .txt, .md, etc) follow those style
guidelines. Then I would be able to use:

  $ prose-style thesis.tex

to validate that I have written `thesis.tex` using a consistent style.

If anyone's got any ideas on how best to achieve this, please let me know! In
the meantime, I might try to come up with a standardized format.

0: Unfortunately, it was also written in Word-format, and the information
contained therein was hard to access. I've transcribed everything into a
markdown-file here:

https://paste.sr.ht/~munksgaard/6d36dc647f2cd1bd4eb44ef9a27053ec443dc802