Nitpicker

Nitpicker is a language style checker which compares your text with a large database of style warnings, common errors, or warnings indicating that you may have once more used the wrong word or preposition. Nitpicker’s goal is to implement the old proverb “shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice”: the moment your supervisor, colleague, reviewer, or local native-speaker finds a mistake in your text, any repetition is just embarrassing.

Nitpicker was written by Niels Lohmann during the final stages of this thesis. At that time, every second page looked like the one on the left when it came back from his supervisor. He quickly realized that he made the same mistakes again and again. Even worse, spell checkers could not help.

A look into several style guide books showed that a lot of phrases and wrong or over-used phrases could be detected automatically. This was the birth of Nitpicker.

Nitpicker is far from being “perfect”, “ready”, a “product”, or whatever vendors would promise. For nearly every rule exist exceptions yielding false positives. Currently, we are fighting these fake warnings and add more and more rules. If you are not afraid of these problems, just give it a try!