Install write-good with Homebrew, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• write-good
• writegood

Project history

The GitHub repository and npm package were both created on 25 April 2014. The npm registry shows rapid early publication from 0.0.0 through several 0.x versions in the first two days, followed years later by 1.0.x maintenance releases, with 1.0.8 published on 16 February 2021.

The README has remained direct about the tool's limited scope and social context: it warns users not to use the tool to be a jerk about other people's writing. That disclaimer is part of write-good's identity as a developer-friendly hinting tool rather than an authority on prose.

Adoption history

write-good became recognizable in the JavaScript and documentation-tooling world because it was easy to run with npm, easy to call from code, and small enough to compose into editor integrations or prose pipelines. Its GitHub repository has accumulated thousands of stars, and the npm registry records the package as a long-lived published module rather than a one-off gist.

The package also inspired adjacent tools and extensions, including custom check sets such as the German `schreib-gut` example in the README. That extension point helped place write-good in the lineage of lightweight prose linting that later includes more configurable tools such as Vale and remark-based writing checks.

How it is used

As a CLI, write-good is usually run against Markdown or text files with a glob, or through `npx write-good`. It prints suggestions to standard output and supports enabling or disabling checks such as passive voice, weasel words, or E-Prime.

As a library, `writeGood(text)` returns suggestion objects with a reason, index, and offset. That API shape made it convenient for editor plugins, scripts, and documentation checks that need machine-readable lint spans instead of only human terminal output.

Why package nerds care

write-good is a classic small npm utility: a memorable name, a narrow job, a command-line entry point, and a reusable library API. For package catalogs, it sits at the intersection of developer tools and writing tools, showing how code-linting conventions migrated into README, documentation, and prose workflows.

Its significance is not that it solved grammar checking broadly, but that it made a handful of editorial heuristics installable and scriptable in the same way developers install code linters.

Timeline

• 2014-04-25: GitHub repository and npm package are created.
• 2014-04-25: Early 0.1.0, 0.2.0, and 0.3.0 npm versions are published.
• 2021-02-16: npm version 1.0.8 is published.
• 2025: The GitHub repository remains active enough to show recent pushes in repository metadata.

Related projects

• schreib-gut is cited by the README as a custom check extension example for German prose.
• Vale and remark-lint occupy the broader prose-linting space with more configurable or documentation-oriented approaches.

Sources

• https://github.com/btford/write-good
• https://registry.npmjs.org/write-good