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STYLE(1)                         User commands                        STYLE(1)


style - analyse surface characteristics of a document


style [-L language] [-l length] [-r ari] [file...] style [--language language] [--print-long length] [--print-ari ari] [file...] style -h|--help style --version


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. Kincaid = 11.8*syllables/wds+0.39*wds/sentences-15.59 Automated Readability Index The Automated Readability Index is typically higher than Kincaid and Coleman-Liau, but lower than Flesch. ARI = 4.71*chars/wds+0.5*wds/sentences-21.43 Coleman-Liau Formula The Coleman-Liau Formula usually gives a lower grade than Kincaid, ARI and Flesch when applied to technical documents. Coleman-Liau = 5.88*chars/wds-29.5*sent/wds-15.8 Flesh reading easy formula 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*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*(wds/sent+100*((wds >= 3 syll)/wds)) Lix formula The Lix formula developed by Bjornsson from Sweden is very simple and employs a mapping table as well: Lix = wds/sent+100*(wds >= 6 char)/wds 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. SMOG-Grading = square root of (((wds >= 3 syll)/sent)*30) + 3 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.


-L language, --language language set the document language (de, en, nl). -l length, --print-long length print all sentences longer than length words. -r ari, --print-ari ari print all sentences whose readability index (ARI) is greater than ari. -p passive, --print-passive print all sentences phrased in the passive voice. -N nominalizations, --print-nom print all sentences containing nominalizations. -n nominalizations-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.




LC_MESSAGES=de|en|nl 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.






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. Coleman, M. and Liau,T.L. (1975). 'A computer readability formula designed for machine scoring', Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 283-284. GNU August 30th, 2007 STYLE(1)

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