I don't really have "reference" books on my desk. Most rotate out quite frequently depending on what I'm researching and writing about. These can range from Raizman's History of Modern Design to Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic.

In addition I make plenty use of thesauruses. I have a few old ratty copies but mostly do a quick flit over my keyboard to pull up synonyms. When a word is on the tip of your tongue, looking up another that you know is related to it in a thesaurus is the best way to efficiently jog your memory.

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suchowMar 2016

Thanks for the feedback. These are issues we've thought about, and we came to different conclusions:

re 2, you'll see at http://proselint.com/approach/ that one of the guiding principles of Proselint is that we defer to experts. In practice, that's meant almost all the advice comes from Bryan Garner's usage guide, Garner's Modern American Usage. He is a careful compiler of advice and you'll find that he is almost never "totally wrong", and when his advice is debated, he knows it, notes it, and provides a thoughtful discussion.

re 1, we think of Proselint as eventually being useful as a training tool, a way to learn the conventions. Note that natural languages are large, with so many low-frequency terms that nobody can learn the whole language. Why err if an automated tool can help? Consider for example demonyms, what you call people from a certain place. How many people know, for example, that people from Manchester are Mancunians, not Manchesterians? Rather than call someone by the wrong name, with Proselint the voice of an expert gently corrects you, and you learn a cool new word.

We aren't a mob of programmers, we are three people who love language, respect it, and think we're 2% of the way to making a great tool, one that The New Yorker could run over its stories to flag issues that its own editors would flag anyways. (In fact, we've done this, running Proselint over a corpus of highly vetted text, and have found numerous issues.)

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capnrefsmmatMar 2016

Garner's focus is on usage, not grammar, so for a usage linter, this doesn't seem like a big problem.

Is there an accessible, comprehensive, easy-to-read guide like Garner's Modern American Usage that's considered more accurate? There don't seem to be many options.

(I have a copy of GMAU and enjoy it, but mostly for discussion of usage, not the details of grammar)

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