The document names itself or its reader two ways
person-consistencyon by default (info)Japanese / English
One document calling itself or its reader two ways ("you" and "one")
Example
How to fix
If the same party is meant, use the form the rest of the document uses. If another party is meant (the company and the writer), make the difference clear to the reader.
Why it matters
Whether a Japanese document calls itself 私たち or 弊社 and its writer 私 or 筆者, and whether an English document addresses its reader as "you" or as "one", is a choice of voice, and chaff does not pick one. Mixed in one document, the reader wonders whether the speaker changed or someone else is meant; it happens most where text was stitched together or another writer added a paragraph. chaff takes the form the document uses most as its habit and points at the other. Quotations, quoted blocks and code are not counted. English "we" and "I" are not compared, since in most documents they name two parties (the organisation and the speaker).
What it does not flag
A document with one form, or whose other form passes a set share of the places (it uses both on purpose), is not reported, nor one whose usual form appears fewer than 3 times. Quotations, quoted blocks, code and words joined to longer ones (東京本社) are not counted. Only "one" as the subject of a modal verb is counted, not "no one", "the one" or "one" after a preposition. Which form is right is not decided.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L2
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- technical, 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 when the other form is 30 percent of the places or fewer |
|---|---|
| normal | reported when the other form is 20 percent of the places or fewer |
| relaxed | reported when the other form is 10 percent of the places or fewer |
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, speech/address
- Turned off by the genre in
- literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/transcript
Message
"{matched}" here, where the document usually says "{usual}" ({count} of {of})
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/person-consistency.yaml