About the book

Create consistent content that gives readers confidence with Vale, the open-source prose linter that helps you enforce your style guide automatically.

• Use battle-tested rules based on freely available, popular style guides
• Apply your brand’s terms with a custom vocabulary.
• Integrate Vale into your text editor, Git hooks, and CI pipeline.
• Catch typos and inclusive-language issues before they ship, and spend your energy on shaping ideas instead of fixing copy.

Whether you’re a technical writer working in a docs-as-code environment, or a software engineer who occasionally writes, you’ll ship clean, consistent copy every time.

Description

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.

About the author

Brian P. Hogan is a technical content expert, open source software developer, educator, author, editor, and musician with more than 15 years of experience developing and leading technical documentation and developer education programs at DigitalOcean, Temporal Technologies, and Tailscale.