Literature
The rules used by Angry Reviewer are based on various journal guidelines, articles, books, and lectures on modern academic writing. Perhaps, the main source of inspiration is The Craft of Scientific Writing by Michael Alley. To learn more about the rules used by Angry Reviewer, see the literature below.
Books
- The Craft of Scientific Writing by Michael Alley
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
- Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English by Hilary Glasman-Deal
Articles
- Elements of Style - Nature Physics 3, 581 (2007)
- How to Write With Style - Article in Novel Writing Help blog
- The Elements of Style - by Strunk, W., Jr. and White, E.B.
Main principles
The algorithm knows hundreds of rules - stylistic, typographic, and just best practices. For the spell check you should rely on your text editor and other services. Below are the main guiding principles:
- Don't hype. Avoid words like novel, highly, clearly, greatly. Better still, avoid all adverbs.
- Don't use clichés. In a nutshell, by and large, they are clear as mud.
- Don't use "very" very often. Usually, there is a better word for it.
- Be concise. Avoid phrases like "by means of, despite the fact that, in order to".
- Avoid negatives. For example, use "unable" instead of "not able".
- Avoid redundancy. For example, use "investigate" instead of "conduct an investigation of".
- Use active voice. Although not always possible, most of the text should be in active voice.
- Avoid inappropriate language. Keep words like "really, actually, pretty much" for social networks.
- Avoid rare words and latinisms. Non credo all readers know the meaning.
- Keep abbreviations to minimum. Abbreviations are hard to read, consider just spelling it out.
- Beware of zombie nouns. Utilization of nominalization is causation of distraction.
Beside these and many smaller rules, Angry Reviewer checks for typical typographic mistakes, references, chemical elements, abbreviations and other details.