pickyrules — English Writing Style Assistant for Research & Generally Less Egregious Writing

Purpose

pickyrules is a local writing style assistant that checks prose against Dr. Dubay’s “Picky Rules of Writing” — a strict, opinionated set of 41 rules covering sentence structure, grammar, argumentation, diction, and formatting. The model is designed for students, writers, and anyone who wants rigorous, rule-grounded feedback on their writing.

Given a passage of text, the model identifies every violation of the Picky Rules, cites the rule number and name, explains why the violation matters, and suggests a concrete revision. When no violations are found, it responds with a brief note on what the writing does well.

Usage

New to Ollama? See how to set it up and use it here. It only takes a few minutes!

1. Once you have installed Ollama, install the model using this command: ollama pull haasrr/pickyrules. Let the install complete.

2. Then simply launch the Ollama interface and and paste your text at the prompt. No commands, no flags — the model accepts raw prose and returns a structured analysis of any rule violations it finds.

You can still ask follow-up questions because the model has enough Gemma personality to recognize that your prompt is dialog rather than more raw prose, which is helpful for challenging a recommendation or clarifying it.

Usage Examples

>>> There are many reasons why passive voice is problematic in academic writing.

Violations found:

**Rule 1 — Weak expletive opener**: "There are" delays the real subject...
**Rule 9 — Passive voice**: "is problematic" weakens the claim...

If your writing is clean:

You go girl!

[brief note on what the writing does well]

Detailed example (screenshots)

Click to view sample prompt response

[ Response truncated for brevity ]

The Model

pickyrules is Gemma 4 E2B fine-tuned with LoRA using Unsloth on a synthetic dataset of 875 training examples — roughly 19–22 examples per rule — covering single violations, compound violations, edge cases, and clean passages (no violations). The model trained for 3 epochs, ending with an average loss of ~0.87 in the last epoch. I expect to be able to improve the loss to around 0.3-0.6 if I ever bother to make better training data.

The rest of this document is Dr. Dubay’s Picky Rules…

Dr. Dubay’s Picky Rules of Writing

Borrowed and adapted with permission from “Professor Harvey’s Picky Rules of Writing” adapted from “Prof. Cohen’s 39 Picky Rules”

Sentence Rules

1. Do not begin sentences in any of the following ways: “There are/is…”, “This is…”, “It is…,” etc.

2. Do not use “this,” “these,” “that,” “those,” “which,” or “it” unless the word has a clear and unmistakable antecedent nearby. Never begin a sentence with “this” unless you follow it immediately with a noun that re-identifies the idea to which you are referring.

3. Never publicly dangle a participle or misplace a modifier: write “Showing unmistakable signs of ignorance, the student did not persuade his professor;” NOT “The student did not persuade his professor, showing unmistakable signs of ignorance.”

4. Never write an incomplete sentence (participles — “ing” words — cannot stand as verbs). A verb must agree with its subject in person and number.

5. Know these three rules about commas:

• a. Join independent clauses (clauses with a subject and a verb) either by using (1) a comma with a conjunction (“Right-handers predominantly use the left side of the brain, so left-handers are the only ones in their right minds.”) or (2) a semicolon without a conjunction (“Right-handers predominantly use the left side of the brain; left-handers are the only ones in their right minds.”)
• b. Separate items in a series by using a comma after every item before the conjunction (“The professor was arbitrary, arrogant, and heartless.”)
• c. Never use a comma between the subject and the verb or between the verb and its object (except for interrupting clauses that use two commas).

6. Bury words like “however,” “furthermore,” “moreover,” “indeed,” etc. (conjunctive adverbs) in the clause or sentence; do not put them at the beginning. (E.g. “The students, however, learned something.”)

7. Be consistent when you have two or more parallel structures.

• With adjectives: “He was pompous, picky, and terrorized freshmen” is wrong. “He was pompous, picky, and fond of terrorizing freshmen” is right.
• With prepositions: “A student could count on his bad temper and arbitrariness” is wrong. “A student could count on his bad temper and on his arbitrariness” is right.
• With correlatives: “He graded a paper not only for content but for style” is wrong. “He graded a paper not only for content but also for style” is right.

8. Do not end a sentence with a preposition.

9. Do not use the passive voice (“Careless students are failed by the ruthless professor”); use the active voice (“The ruthless professor fails careless students”). Because the active voice is direct and clear, this rule is the most important of style, but it has serious consequences for your meaning as well. Politicians, administrators, and those foolishly trying to avoid the consequences of their actions love the passive voice because it protects them from facts and responsibility: “Mistakes were made.”

10. Adverbs should be adverbs. Do not do it different — if you know what I am saying.

11. Walker’s Rule for Pronouns: every pronoun should have a clear antecedent to which it agrees in person, number, and gender.

Paragraph and Thesis Rules

12. Each paragraph must stick to the subject introduced by its first sentence. Most importantly, the first sentence of the first paragraph must establish the context of your paper. “John Wayne first appears in Stagecoach with a rifle in his hand.” NOT “Duke has a gun.”

13. Do not use one or two sentences as a paragraph.

14. Make the transition between your sentences and your paragraphs clear and logical. This task is the most difficult in writing, but, as you know, life is hard.

15. Give your paper a clear thesis sentence at the end of your first paragraph. If you can remember only one rule, this rule is the one you must remember. The first paragraph should also demonstrate how the rest of the paper is organized.

16. Avoid using quotations to begin or end a paragraph or a paper. Your own words are most important in those places.

17. In longer papers remind the reader of your thesis throughout the body of your paper.

Rules Concerning Argumentation

18. Never just summarize or paraphrase. Assume your reader has read/seen it. I do not want to know what happened. I want to know your ideas about what happened.

19. Support your assertions and ideas with concrete examples, with brief quotes from the story, book, or film you are discussing, or with a short citation from some reliable authority.

20. Do not hedge. Words like “maybe,” “seem,” “perhaps,” and “might” do not keep you from being wrong; they merely alert the reader to the fact that you are worried about it.

21. Avoid vague generalizations: “as we all know,” “people say,” “since the beginning of time,” etc. Obvious claims such as “mankind would not exist without the heart” are equally lamentable.

22. Write about works of art in the present tense, since Hamlet will be stabbing Polonius and Roy Hobbs will be knocking the lights out with his home runs long after your grandchildren have forgotten your name.

23. Avoid rhetorical questions.

24. Delete the phrase “in the past” from your writing as well as any hint of chronological snobbery. Chronological snobbery is the erroneous assumption that, with the passage of time, mankind has gotten progressively wiser. In the past such a pedantic list of writing rules would have been unnecessary for undergraduates.

25. When citing a dictionary refer to the Oxford English Dictionary whenever possible.

Diction Rules

26. Do not misspell words. Misspelled words look dumb; do not look dumb. Use a dictionary or a literate friend to check your spelling. On a word processor always use spell-check, but do not trust it! Possessing a limited vocabulary and undiscerning between right words spelled wrongly and wrong words spelled rightly, spell-check is no substitute for proofreading. Spell out one and two digit numbers.

27. Never use contractions.

28. A possessive without an apostrophe is a misspelled word. One exception is the possessive of “it”: “its.” “It is” contracts to “it’s.” Since you will not use contractions, you will never write “it’s” on a paper.

29. Choose the best word for the context. Your papers should be a place “where every word is at home, taking its place to support the others” (Eliot “Little Gidding,” V.217–218). Beware of unintended irony: an N.C. State basketballer once explained his ability to shoot with either hand, “yeah, I’m amphibious.” Suffice it to say this student-athlete, to avoid drowning in his coursework, crawled out of school and into the NBA.

30. Also beware these other egregious violations of Rule 29:

• Jargon — say “library”; do not say “instructional media center”
• Cliché — say “the professor is a conservative grouch”; do not say “the professor is an old fogey”
• Slang — say “the teacher is foolish”; do not say “the teacher is a dork”
• Hyperbole — say “this man has too high a regard for himself”; do not say “this man is the most arrogant jerk who ever lived”
• Gobbledygook — say “now”; do not say “at this point in time”
• Malapropism — confusion of idioms; one former NFL player commented, “I really cleaned his bell; I rang his clock”

31. Use your smallest most Anglo-Saxon, most comfortable words; big words impress only high school teachers and smell of the thesaurus.

32. Lose the word “very” and, like, you know, other gratuitous additives from, you know, your written and spoken vocabulary.

Format Rules

33. Number your pages at the top right-hand corner.

34. Give your paper an informative title. The name of the work you are dealing with is NOT the title of your paper. “Shakespeare’s Use of Time in Hamlet” is by a thoughtful person; “It Takes a Broken Egghead to Make a Hamlet” is by a clown; Hamlet is by Shakespeare.

35. Italicize or underline all full-length films, plays, and books. Do likewise with magazine and newspaper titles. Short stories, film shorts, one-act plays, and articles go in quotation marks (“…”). Do not underline or put your own title in quotation marks.

36. On those extremely rare occasions when you quote more than two lines of text, indent and single space the quotation, and leave off the quotation marks.

37. When you quote from or refer to a source, cite it appropriately and include a works cited page of some kind.

38. Do not use an ellipsis (…) to begin or end a quotation. An ellipsis denotes an omission of text and should only occur in the middle of a quotation.

39. Before handing in your final copy, have an intelligent friend read your paper to you; then fix it.

40. Be safe: frequently save your file, and if possible keep a hard copy, and/or a version on another drive.

41. Do not hand in a paper unless you have come to care about it. You believe in goodness and truth; therefore, commit yourself to communicating your ideas well and true.