All rules

Too many proper nouns

proper-noun-densityon by default (info)Japanese / English

So many product, company and personal names that a newcomer gets lost

Example

Flagged
Alice Moreno and Bob Tanaka from Contoso met Carol Diaz from Fabrikam in Seattle, then flew with Dave Okafor from Northwind to Boston to see Erin Walsh at Tailspin and Frank Liu at Litware. In Chicago, Grace Kim of Proseware and Henry Park of Wingtip joined Ivan Petrov of Adatum, and Julia Rossi of Contoso brought Kevin Shah of Fabrikam. From Denver, Laura Chen of Northwind and Mark Evans of Tailspin called Nina Alvarez of Litware, Oscar Grant of Proseware and Paula Novak of Wingtip.
What chaff prints
1:1 166 proper nouns per 1000 words (limit 150)
Fixed
Two of our sales team met three customers on the West Coast, then flew to Boston to meet two more. In Chicago, three partners joined them, and our account lead brought a fourth. From Denver, two of the team called the remaining customers.
What chaff prints
no finding
chaff.yaml used for this example
rules: proper-noun-density: strict

The rule measures the whole document, so this example was tried with an ordinary passage (about 200 words) after it that gives chaff nothing to report.

How to fix

After first use, refer back to it. One phrase saying what it is lets a stranger keep reading.

Why it matters

A run of product, company and person names hides the shape of the sentence from anyone who does not already know them. It reads fine to the person who wrote it.

What it does not flag

A name listed under names in chaff.yaml counts as one, however many words it has. Short documents (under 200 words) are not measured.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: proper-noun-density — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax proper-noun-density --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: proper-noun-density: off
Technical details
Layer
L3
Status
stable
Severity
info
Languages
Japanese and English
Suited to
blog, business, technical, 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).

strictup to 150 proper nouns per 1000 words
normalup to 200 proper nouns per 1000 words
relaxedup to 260 proper nouns per 1000 words

By genre

Runs by default in
technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/meeting-notes
Turned off by the genre in
business/press-release, 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

Genres

Message

{density} proper nouns per 1000 words (limit {limit})

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/proper-noun-density.yaml