Improving My Writing Style One Python Script at a Time

One of my pet peeves about my natural writing style is how I lean into complex sentences divided by commas. Left unchecked, my prose starts looking like it might be ChatGPT’s attempt at writing a blog post in the style of s-expressions. I thought it would be neat to try and write some code to help me proofread for this specific issue and improve my posts.

So much of my Python experience is from writing apps with Django that I forgot how quick and easy it is to whip up a small script that does some text processing with nothing but the standard library. As much as I appreciate static types and exhaustiveness checking in larger programs, being able to ignore edge cases that I know don’t appear in the specific input I’m concerned with is a relief for scripts like this.

The first script I wrote looks for sequences of multiple sentences that have too many commas in them. If there are more than three commas in two adjacent sentences, I need to reword something. Here’s its output on one of my first blogposts, Switching to Emacs:

***
One thing I started to worry about recently has been my reliance on a closed-source, and, once I'm out of college, pretty expensive editor.
Sure, many employers pay for licenses, but it would be awesome if I could configure an editor that worked well for me and was also completely open-source.
- 5 commas
***
Sure, many employers pay for licenses, but it would be awesome if I could configure an editor that worked well for me and was also completely open-source.
A few months ago, I switched my Python development to VSCode, where I had already been doing frontend JS/TypeScript dev for a few years.
- 4 commas
***
After learning vim keybindings this summer, I would've definitely liked to also be using the keyboard more often.
Primarily, though, I'd heard really cool things about [org-mode](https://orgmode.org/), and wanted to try it out.
- 4 commas
***
Primarily, though, I'd heard really cool things about [org-mode](https://orgmode.org/), and wanted to try it out.
Full support of org-mode is only present in emacs, which in the midst of quarantine would be a bit of excitement to check out.
- 4 commas
***
The Python language server was a bit finnicky, but after setting it up, along with JavaScript, I'm already at a point where I can be productive.
I enabled a few more Doom modules, like a terminal emulator (`term`) and a file explorer (`treemacs`).
- 4 commas

Since these windows are all processed in order, I can see without any extra processing that there’s actually two sequences of three sentences with 7 and 6 commas respectively.

As you might expect, I ran this post through the script before publishing. It had no notes! I’m improving already.