All rules

Too long before the point

preamble-lengthon by default (info)Japanese / English

Too many paragraphs before the first heading, which delays the point

Example

Flagged
# Store plan for next year Over the years we have opened most of our stores near stations. In the last ten years the number of stores has doubled. Suburban stores, however, have struggled to grow. ## Decision Next year we will close two suburban stores and open one near a station.
What chaff prints
3:1 3 paragraphs before the first heading (limit 2)
Fixed
# Store plan for next year Next year we will close two suburban stores and open one near a station. ## Why The number of stores has doubled in ten years, but suburban stores have struggled to grow.
What chaff prints
no finding

How to fix

Put the conclusion first, or move the preamble under a heading.

Why it matters

A reader of a business document is looking for the decision. Paragraphs before the first heading only delay it. A paragraph with no closed sentence (a category label, an author line) and an address field whose value is only a name ("To" followed by a company name) are not counted.

What it does not flag

A document with no heading below its title is not measured. Legal and blog genres, and letters and emails, do not run this rule. A note attached to a word of the text (a paragraph opened by a note mark of the note-mark lexicon, as in Japanese ※1) is a note, not preamble, and is not counted.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: preamble-length — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax preamble-length --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: preamble-length: off
Technical details
Layer
L1
Status
stable
Severity
info
Languages
Japanese and English
Suited to
business, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech
Reads from the document
headings

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).

strictup to 1 paragraphs before the first heading
normalup to 2 paragraphs before the first heading
relaxedup to 4 paragraphs before the first heading

By genre

Runs by default in
business/proposal, business/report, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes
Turned off by the genre in
business/email, 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/address, speech/transcript
Not suited to, and not run in
technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media

Genres

Message

{count} paragraphs before the first heading (limit {limit})

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