Too many sentences that announce before they say

announcing-openeron by default (info)Japanese / English

Openers that announce a point before making it ("The key point is") piled up

Example

Flagged

The key point is that settings come first. Here's the thing: logs matter too. Honestly, the manual is out of date.

What chaff prints

1:1 "The key point is" and other announcing openers start 3 sentences (3 needed) 1:44 "Here's the thing" and other announcing openers start 3 sentences (3 needed) 1:79 "Honestly," and other announcing openers start 3 sentences (3 needed)

Fixed

Check the settings first and keep the log of that check. The manual is last year's, so the screen names differ.

What chaff prints

no finding

How to fix

Delete the announcement and start with the point. If it really is the one point that matters most, keep that one.

Why it matters

"The key point is", "Here's the thing" and "Honestly," announce a point before making it. Once, that is a signpost; piled up, every sentence claims the same weight and the announcements are all that stand out. A habit well known in generated text.

What it does not flag

An announcing phrase inside a sentence, and fewer than the level needs, are not reported.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)

Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)

npx chaffjs relax announcing-opener --why "reason"

Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)

rules: announcing-opener: off

Technical details

Layer: L2
Status: stable
Severity: info
Languages: Japanese and English
Suited to: technical/readme, blog, business, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech

Levels

Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).

strict	reported once 2 sentences open with an announcement
normal	reported once 3 sentences open with an announcement
relaxed	reported once 5 sentences open with an announcement

By genre

Runs by default in: technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, academic/paper
Turned off by the genre in: legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
Not suited to, and not run in: technical/spec

Genres

Message

"{matched}" and other announcing openers start {count} sentences ({limit} needed)

Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/announcing-opener.yaml