Style analyses the surface characteristics of the writing style
of a document. It prints various readability grades, length of words,
sentences and paragraphs.
It can further locate sentences with certain characteristics.
If no files are given, the document is read from standard input.
Numbers are counted as words with one syllable.
A sentence is a sequence of words, that starts with a capitalised word and
ends with a full stop, double colon, question mark or exclamation mark.
A single letter followed by a dot is considered an abbreviation, so it
does not end a sentence. Various multi-letter abbreviations are
recognized, they do not end a sentence as well.
A paragraph
consists of two or more new line characters.
Readability grades
Style understands cpp(1) #line lines for being able to
give precise locations when printing sentences.
Kincaid formula
The Kincaid Formula has been developed for Navy training manuals, that
ranged in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3. It is probably best applied
to technical documents, because it is based on adult training manuals
rather than school book text. Dialogs (often found in fictional texts)
are usually a series of short sentences, which lowers the score. On the
other hand, scientific texts with many long scientific terms are rated
higher, although they are not necessarily harder to read for people
who are familiar with those terms.
italic "Kincaid" = 11.8 * syllables over words + 0.39 * words over sentences - 15.59
The Flesh reading easy formula has been developed by Flesh in 1948 and
it is based on school text covering grade 3 to 12. It is wide spread,
especially in the USA, because of good results and simple computation.
The index is usually between 0 (hard) and 100 (easy), standard English
documents averages approximately 60 to 70. Applying it to German
documents does not deliver good results because of the different language
structure.
Flesch ~ Index = 206.835 - 84.6 * syllables over words - 1.015 * words over sentences
Flesch Index = 206.835-84.6*syll/wds-1.015*wds/sent
Fog Index
The Fog index has been developed by Robert Gunning. Its value is a
school grade. The ``ideal'' Fog Index level is 7 or 8. A level above
12 indicates the writing sample is too hard for most people to read.
Only use it on texts of at least hundred words to get meaningful results.
Note that a correct implementation would not count words of three or
more syllables that are proper names, combinations of easy words, or
made three syllables by suffixes such as ed, es, or ing.
Fog ~ Index = 0.4 * left ( words over sentences + 100 * { { words >= 3 ~ syllables } over words } right )
Fog Index = 0.4*(wds/sent+100*((wds >= 3 syll)/wds))
Lix formula
The Lix formula developed by Björnsson from Sweden is very simple and
employs a mapping table as well:
Lix =
words over sentences + 100 * { words > 6 ~ characters } over words
Lix = wds/sent+100*(wds >= 6 char)/wds
tab(#);
l c c c c c c c c c c c c c c c.
Index#34##38##41##44##48##51##54##57
School year##5##6##7##8##9##10##11
SMOG-Grading
The SMOG-Grading for English texts has been developed by McLaughlin
in 1969. Its result is a school grade.
It has been adapted to German by Bamberger & Vanecek in 1984, who changed
the constant +3 to -2.
Word usage
The word usage counts are intended to help identify excessive use of particular
parts of speech.
Verb Phrases
The category of verbs labeled "to be" identifies phrases using the passive
voice. Use the passive voice sparingly, in favor of more direct verb forms.
The flag -p causes style to list all occurrences of the passive
voice.
The verb category "aux" measures the use of modal auxiliary verbs, such as
"can", "could", and "should". Modal auxiliary verbs modify the mood of a verb.
Conjunctions
The conjunctions counted by style are coordinating and subordinating.
Coordinating conjunctions join grammatically equal sentence fragments, such as
a noun with a noun, a phrase with a phrase, or a clause to a clause.
Coordinating conjunctions are "and," "but," "or," "yet," and "nor."
Subordinating conjunctions connect clauses of unequal status. A subordinating
conjunction links a subordinate clause, which is unable to stand alone, to an
independent clause. Examples of subordinating conjunctions are "because,"
"although," and "even if."
Pronouns
Pronouns are contextual references to nouns and noun phrases. Documents with
few pronouns generally lack cohesiveness and fluidity. Too many pronouns may
indicate ambiguity.
Nominalizations
Nominalizations are verbs that are changed to nouns. Style recognizes words
that end in "ment," "ance," "ence," or "ion" as nominalizations.
Examples are "endowment," "admittance," and "nominalization." Too much
nominalization in a document can sound abstract and be difficult to understand.
The flag -N causes style to list all nominalizations. The
flag -n prints all sentences with either the passive voice or a
nominalization.
OPTIONS
-Llanguage, --languagelanguage
set the document language.
-llength, --print-longlength
print all sentences longer than length words.
-rari, --print-ariari
print all sentences whose readability index (ARI) is greater than ari.
-ppassive, --print-passive
print all sentences phrased in the passive voice.
-Nnominalizations, --print-nom
print all sentences containing nominalizations.
-nnominalizations-passive, --print-nom-passive
print all sentences phrased in the passive voice or containing nominalizations.
-h, --help
Print a short usage message.
--version
Print the version.
ERRORS
On usage errors, 1 is returned. Termination caused by lack of memory is
signalled by exit code 2.
ENVIRONMENT
LC_MESSAGES=de|en
specifies the default document language. The default language is en.
LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1
specifies the document character set. The default character set is ASCII.
AUTHOR
This program is GNU software, copyright 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001,
2002 Michael Haardt <michael@moria.de>.
It contains contributions by Jason Petrone <jpetrone@acm.org> and
Uschi Stegemeier <uschi@morwain.de>.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
HISTORY
There has been a style command on old UNIX systems, which is now part
of the AT&T DWB package. The original version was bound to roff by
enforcing a call to deroff.
SEE ALSO
deroff(1), diction(1)
Cherry, L.L.; Vesterman, W.: Writing Tools The STYLE and DICTION
programs, Computer Science Technical Report 91, Bell Laboratories,
Murray Hill, N.J. (1981), republished as part of the 4.4BSD User's
Supplementary Documents by O'Reilly.
De Vries, Hugo: Reading Ease@WWW, http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/~hdevries/RE.html
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