tense

A house-style rule, off until a decisions table turns it on: it reports a claim in the future tense, or a first-person account of a change.

What it catches

A claim in the future tense, or a first-person account of a change.

Dimension

conventions: a house or genre convention is broken. A finding is counted on the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.

Why

House style: this repository describes what the code does, in the present tense, with no author in a description. A team elsewhere writes "we" and "I" in a pull request, so the rule is off unless a decisions table turns it on.

Default decision

The code is PRF5004. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:

House style ships off: the rule encodes one repository's conventions, not a rule of plain writing. A repository turns it on in its decisions table.

Changing it

A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its -decisions flag names:

{
  "rules": {"tense": "deny"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"tense": "off"}}
}

rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.

Seeing it

A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:

{"rule": "tense", "code": "PRF5004", "decision": "deny", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/tense/"}

proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.

See also

• All proofread rules - every rule, grouped by what it checks
• Writing rules - how the rules apply to this repository's pages and pull requests
• The findings contract - the fields every finding carries