Write Better with Vale: Automate Your Style Guides and Lint Prose Like You Lint Code - Paperback

by Brian P. Hogan (Author), Susannah Davidson (Editor)

Lint your docs like code: turn any style guide into enforceable rules with Vale and publish clear, consistent content every time.

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, and 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.

When you work on a content project, keeping things consistent can feel impossible. Typos slip through, people don't follow style rules, and each contributor brings a slightly different voice. Vale helps you ensure consistency across your content.

You'll start by catching typos as you learn how Vale works through hands-on examples. Then you'll bring in community rules based on Google's and Microsoft's style guides. You'll combine overlapping styles, adjust the rules to match your needs, and start shaping the experience you want readers to have. Then you'll build your own rules from scratch and create a custom vocabulary to teach Vale to enforce your team's voice and jargon. By the end, you'll have a fully integrated, reusable style package that works in your editor, GitHub Actions, and your build systems. And while this book uses Markdown in its examples, you'll be ready to apply everything you learned to reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, and even the comments in your source code.

Vale gives you a fast, reliable, and customizable way to keep your content consistent.

What You Need:

This book uses Vale 3.12.0 or higher. You'll need a text editor like Visual Studio Code or Vim. You should be familiar with basic regular expressions, and be comfortable working with command-line tools and Markdown.

Author Biography

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.