A comparison with nothing to compare with
comparative-without-baselineon by default (info)Japanese / English
A comparison such as "is faster" that never says faster than what
Example
How to fix
Name what it is compared with ("is faster" becomes "is twice as fast as version 2"), or state the fact instead of comparing ("finishes in one second").
Why it matters
"Better results" and "the new engine is faster" leave the reader unable to check anything unless they say better or faster than what. Marketing copy is full of them: they sound like a claim and promise nothing. A comparative that closes a clause after a verb ("is faster.", "is more efficient.") is reported when neither its sentence nor the one before names what it is compared with ("than", "previous", "before").
What it does not flag
A comparison whose sentence or the one before names a baseline ("than", "previous", "before", "compared", "whereas"), one that goes past what was just named ("even better", "still faster"), a comparative before a noun ("better results", read only in Japanese), a comparative that does not close its clause ("runs faster on large files"), one under a condition or a hypothesis ("if it looks better", "would be easier"), an aim to make something better than it is now (より良い社会, より良い高齢社会, より良いものにする, より簡単にする in Japanese), a comparison inside a wish or a purpose (より広く進めたい, より円滑にするためには), a set phrase ending in a comparative ("or to be more precise, it created"), and a comparison right after two code examples ("This is much better!" after a rewritten function, compared with the first) are not reported.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L3
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- business, technical, blog, docs, academic, legal, literature, speech
- Reads from the document
- pos
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 | warning |
|---|---|
| normal | info |
| relaxed | info |
This rule has no limit to count to. A level sets how a finding is marked: relaxed keeps the finding and marks it a step lower.
By genre
- Runs by default in
- technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper
- Turned off by the genre in
- literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
Message
"{matched}" does not say what it is compared with
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/comparative-without-baseline.yaml