All rules

Unfilled placeholder

unfilled-placeholderon by defaultJapanese / English

A template blank left unfilled, such as "[Your Name]" or "TODO: …"

Example

Flagged
We can meet on [Insert Date] to go through the quote.
What chaff prints
1:16 "[Insert Date]" was never filled in
Fixed
We can meet on Friday 9 October to go through the quote.
What chaff prints
no finding

How to fix

Fill it in. If it is meant as an example, say so ("for example, Jane Smith").

Why it matters

"[Your Name]" and "[Insert Date]" are the blanks a template or a generated draft leaves. A value that only says "TODO: …" or "TBD" is a blank too, left to fill in later, and so is an instruction line from the template left in a filled report ("OPTIONAL: General conclusions …"). This is not a matter of style: the blank was never filled. In a Japanese business document, the blank marks (〇〇) left where a name, a sum or a date belongs (〇〇様, 株式会社〇〇, 〇万円) are blanks too.

What it does not flag

Markdown links and reference definitions, footnote numbers, checkboxes and checklist items ("- [ ] TODO: …"), a label its value follows ("[Date]: 2024-04-01"), "Optional:" not in capitals and OPTIONAL inside a line, code and code comments ("// TODO"), "TBD" inside a sentence ("the date is TBD"), and blanks under a heading that names a template ("## Template", "# Sample letter") are not reported. Nor is a Japanese example mark (○○) inside a sentence or outside a business document.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: unfilled-placeholder — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax unfilled-placeholder --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: unfilled-placeholder: off
Technical details
Layer
L2
Status
stable
Severity
warning
Languages
Japanese and English
Suited to
blog, business, technical, 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).

stricterror
normalwarning
relaxedinfo

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, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript

Genres

Message

"{matched}" was never filled in

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