<rule id="FREE_GIFT" name="free gift">
<pattern>
<token>free</token>
<token>gift</token>
</pattern>
<message>Shorten this redundant phrase to <suggestion>gift</suggestion>.</message>
<url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm</url>
<example correction=''>Receive a <marker>free gift</marker> with every purchase.</example>
<example>Receive a gift with every purchase.</example>
</rule>
Thanks Andrew.
I will add the rule as soon as possible. (I have a problem with GitHub, so I cannot add the rule now.)
Thanks for your contribution.
Hi Mike,
OK, thank you. It was interesting to create this rule in XML.
I could list many redundant phrases and other rules, but I probably could not find the time to code them into XML. Is there another good way to suggest them for submission? For example I group them into chunks and could post them here or as GitHub issues.
Here are two good sources for more rules
- Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases - PMC
- Pleonasm - Wikipedia
Andrew
One more source: Auto-antonym - Wikipedia
Hi Andrew,
LT has a rule editor, which can help you to create a rule: Create a new LanguageTool rule. If you have many rules, using the rule editor is slow.
You could automate the rule-creation process. I have an Excel spreadsheet in which I keep the source data for rules. I convert the source data into XML rules using PowerGrep (http://www.powergrep.com/). (This method is not good for all types of rule.)
If automation is not possible for you, add a group of proposed rules to a post in the forum. I will then convert the proposed rules to XML.
If there are many rules and they have all the same structure and the same message we might also write a Java rule. This way we don’t repeat the XML.
A nice feature in LanguageTool Options would be to show which rules are coded in Java and which rules are in the XML.
You can see this on Browse LanguageTool Rules: 5,836 matches for English when you click on one of the links. There’s either a “Pattern” or a link to a Java rule.
Andrew,
I added a rule for ‘free gift’. It should be in the build tonight (https://languagetool.org/download/snapshots/?C=M;O=D).