About

Content is a crucial part of your product’s user experience, whether it’s your product documentation, blog, use cases, or even customer education material. Your technical content is often the first place technical people go to evaluate a product, and clear, clean, and consistent content creates a great experience.

Style guides lay out the rules for that clarity and consistency. Whether you’re writing for your English class or your company’s blog, it’s a good bet there’s a style you’re supposed to follow. Sometimes it’s written down in a series of web pages or internal docs. Other times it’s held in the head space of your senior editors.

If you write code, you’ve no doubt come across “code linters”, tools that enforce code style. You can get the same experience for your prose.

Vale lets you turn a style guide into a set of rules that ensure your writing is consistent. Vale is a prose linter. You can use Vale to check for spelling errors, typos, heading consistency, profanity, grammar issues, and much more. You can hook Vale into your workflow and have it lint your writing while you work, and integrate it into your continuous integration process. Using Vale, you can automate your style guide.

Best of all, you don’t have to start from scratch. If you based your style guide on Microsoft or Google’s style guides, you can import Vale’s implementations of those guides, or many others, into your project and extend them or change them to suit your needs.

In this short book you’ll get hands-on with Vale, customizing its features, using rules from the community, and building your own style you can use to improve the user experience for your documentation.