Expletive construction
expletive-constructionon by default (info)English
Many sentences that open with "There is" or "It is ... that"
Example
Flagged
There is a meeting on Friday to review the budget. It is the finance team that will lead it.
What chaff prints
1:1 "There is ..." appears 2 times (limit 1)
1:52 "It is ..." appears 2 times (limit 1)
Fixed
The team meets on Friday to review the budget. The finance team will lead it.
What chaff prints
no finding
chaff.yaml used for this example
rules:
expletive-construction: strict
How to fix
Put the subject first. "There is a need to review" becomes "the board must review".
Why it matters
"There is" and "it is ... that" push the subject to the back and drop who does what.
What it does not flag
"It is" without a that-clause ("it is raining") is not counted.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: expletive-construction — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax expletive-construction --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules:
expletive-construction: off
Technical details
- Layer
- L3
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- en
- Suited to
- blog, business, legal, docs, academic, 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 | up to 1 such sentences |
|---|---|
| normal | up to 3 such sentences |
| relaxed | up to 6 such sentences |
By genre
- Runs by default in
- blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, speech/address
- Turned off by the genre in
- legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/transcript
- Not suited to, and not run in
- technical/spec, technical/readme
Message
"{word} is ..." appears {count} times (limit {limit})
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/expletive-construction.yaml