Editing Tools and Originality Checks
You run a prose checker over the new alerts guide and get 38 warnings. Some point at real problems. Others are nonsense: it flags "Nightjar" as a spelling mistake eleven times. Editing tools are fast at finding suspects and poor at judging them. Knowing the difference is the skill.
The rule
Tools flag suspects; you deliver the verdict.
The main kinds of checking tool:
- Spelling and grammar checkers catch typos and slips such as "the alert are sent". Most editors have one built in.
- Style linters check text against rules you set from your style guide: banned words such as "simply", required product terms, heading capitalisation. Vale is a widely used open-source example, and it can run automatically on every pull request.
- Readability measures estimate how hard a text is from sentence and word length. Treat the score as a signal to look closer, never as a target.
- Link checkers find broken links before readers do.
- Originality checkers, often called plagiarism checkers, compare your text with published pages and highlight passages that match.
Originality needs judgement too. Some matches are expected and fine: the exact text of an open-source license, a quoted error message, a standard term. Others are a real problem. Sentences lifted from another company's docs are not yours to publish, and changing a few words does not fix that. Rewrite from your own understanding, and credit any source whose facts you relied on.
The shortcut
For every flag, run suspect, rule, verdict: what is the tool suspicious of, which rule is behind it, and does that rule apply here? Then fix the text, accept it as it is, or teach the tool so the false alarm never returns.
"Nightjar: unknown word"
Suspect: spelling. The rule does not apply to your product's name. Verdict: add "Nightjar" to the tool's vocabulary.
There are two opposite traps. Obeying every flag can make text worse, for example by "correcting" a technical term. Ignoring the tools means the same slips reach readers again and again.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
Your spell checker flags "webhook" on every line of the Slack alerts page, and your style guide uses "webhook". What should you do?
A readability tool marks a page as "difficult". What does that tell you?
An originality check shows your explanation matches another company's docs sentence for sentence. What do you do?
Which match in an originality report is acceptable?
Remember
- Tools flag suspects; you deliver the verdict.
- Shortcut: suspect, rule, verdict, then fix, accept, or teach the tool.
- Trap: obeying every flag, or ignoring the tools altogether.