Overview

Learn about Vale and its use cases.

What is (and isn’t) Vale?

When you think about software built for automated writing assistance, a lot of assumptions probably come to mind. You’ve heard terms like “cloud-based,” “artificial intelligence,” and “machine learning.” You’ve been promised “sophisticated,” human-like feedback to dramatically improve your writing.

Vale is none of that—it wasn’t designed to be, and it doesn’t try to be. To put it succinctly, Vale doesn’t teach you how to write; it’s a tool for writers.

This distinction is particularly important to understand because Vale doesn’t offer any of its own advice. Instead, it offers a framework for creating and enforcing custom rules. Its approach is much more similar to code linters than it is to traditional grammar checkers.

See “Introducing Vale, an NLP-powered linter for prose” for a more detailed explanation.

Why should you use Vale?

  • It will enforce your own style and can go well beyond traditional writing-related rules.

  • It understands markup well, allowing you to write your content in Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, and more, without syntax-related false positives.

  • It works 100% offline. Your content is never sent to a remote server for processing.

  • It’s fast, and can be used pretty much anywhere: the terminal, your favorite editor, the web, or with a CI/CD service.

Who is using Vale?

a lot of people.