1STYLE(1) User commands STYLE(1)
2
6 style - analyse surface characteristics of a document
7
9 style [-L language] [-l length] [-r ari] [file...]
10 style [--language language] [--print-long length] [--print-ari ari]
11 [file...]
12 style -h|--help
13 style --version
14
16 Style analyses the surface characteristics of the writing style of a
17 document. It prints various readability grades, length of words, sen‐
18 tences and paragraphs. It can further locate sentences with certain
19 characteristics. If no files are given, the document is read from
20 standard input.
21 Numbers are counted as words with one syllable. A sentence is a se‐
23 quence of words, that starts with a capitalised word and ends with a
24 full stop, double colon, question mark or exclamation mark. A single
25 letter followed by a dot is considered an abbreviation, so it does not
26 end a sentence. Various multi-letter abbreviations are recognized,
27 they do not end a sentence as well. A paragraph consists of two or
28 more new line characters.
29 Readability grades
31 Style understands cpp(1) #line lines for being able to give precise lo‐
32 cations when printing sentences.
33 Kincaid formula
35 The Kincaid Formula was developed for Navy training manuals,
36 that ranged in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3. It is probably best
37 applied to technical documents, because it is based on adult
38 training manuals rather than school book text. Dialogs (often
39 found in fictional texts) are usually a series of short sen‐
40 tences, which lowers the score. On the other hand, scientific
41 texts with many long scientific terms are rated higher, although
42 they are not necessarily harder to read for people who are fa‐
43 miliar with those terms.
44 Kincaid = 11.8*syllables/wds+0.39*wds/sentences-15.59
46 Automated Readability Index
48 The Automated Readability Index is typically higher than Kincaid
49 and Coleman-Liau, but lower than Flesch.
50 ARI = 4.71*chars/wds+0.5*wds/sentences-21.43
52 Coleman-Liau Formula
54 The Coleman-Liau Formula usually gives a lower grade than Kin‐
55 caid, ARI and Flesch when applied to technical documents.
56 Coleman-Liau = 5.88*chars/wds-29.5*sent/wds-15.8
58 Flesh reading easy formula
60 The Flesh reading easy formula was developed by Flesh in 1948
61 and it is based on school text covering grade 3 to 12. It is
62 wide spread, especially in the USA, because of good results and
63 simple computation. The index is usually between 0 (hard) and
64 100 (easy), standard English documents averages approximately 60
65 to 70. Applying it to German documents does not deliver good
66 results because of the different language structure.
67 Flesch Index = 206.835-84.6*syll/wds-1.015*wds/sent
69 Fog Index
71 The Fog index was developed by Robert Gunning. Its value is a
72 school grade. The ``ideal'' Fog Index level is 7 or 8. A level
73 above 12 indicates the writing sample is too hard for most peo‐
74 ple to read. Only use it on texts of at least hundred words to
75 get meaningful results. Note that a correct implementation
76 would not count words of three or more syllables that are proper
77 names, combinations of easy words, or made three syllables by
78 suffixes such as –ed, –es, or –ing.
79 Fog Index = 0.4*(wds/sent+100*((wds >= 3 syll)/wds))
81 Lix formula
83 The Lix formula developed by Björnsson from Sweden is very sim‐
84 ple and employs a mapping table as well:
85 Lix = wds/sent+100*(wds >= 6 char)/wds
87 Index 34 38 41 44 48 51 54 57
90 School year 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
91 SMOG-Grading
93 The SMOG-Grading for English texts was developed by McLaughlin
94 in 1969. Its result is a school grade.
95 SMOG-Grading = square root of (((wds >= 3 syll)/sent)*30) + 3
97 It has been adapted to German by Bamberger & Vanecek in 1984,
99 who changed the constant +3 to -2.
100 Word usage
102 The word usage counts are intended to help identify excessive use of
103 particular parts of speech.
104 Verb Phrases
106 The category of verbs labeled "to be" identifies phrases using
107 the passive voice. Use the passive voice sparingly, in favor of
108 more direct verb forms. The flag -p causes style to list all
109 occurrences of the passive voice.
110 The verb category "aux" measures the use of modal auxiliary verbs, such
112 as "can", "could", and "should". Modal auxiliary verbs modify the mood
113 of a verb.
114 Conjunctions
116 The conjunctions counted by style are coordinating and subordi‐
117 nating. Coordinating conjunctions join grammatically equal sen‐
118 tence fragments, such as a noun with a noun, a phrase with a
119 phrase, or a clause to a clause. Coordinating conjunctions are
120 "and," "but," "or," "yet," and "nor."
121 Subordinating conjunctions connect clauses of unequal status. A subor‐
123 dinating conjunction links a subordinate clause, which is unable to
124 stand alone, to an independent clause. Examples of subordinating con‐
125 junctions are "because," "although," and "even if."
126 Pronouns
128 Pronouns are contextual references to nouns and noun phrases.
129 Documents with few pronouns generally lack cohesiveness and flu‐
130 idity. Too many pronouns may indicate ambiguity.
131 Nominalizations
133 Nominalizations are verbs that are changed to nouns. Style rec‐
134 ognizes words that end in "ment," "ance," "ence," or "ion" as
135 nominalizations. Examples are "endowment," "admittance," and
136 "nominalization." Too much nominalization in a document can
137 sound abstract and be difficult to understand. The flag -N
138 causes style to list all nominalizations. The flag -n prints
139 all sentences with either the passive voice or a nominalization.
140
142 -L language, --language language
143 set the document language (de, en, nl).
144 -l length, --print-long length
146 print all sentences longer than length words.
147 -r ari, --print-ari ari
149 print all sentences whose readability index (ARI) is greater
150 than ari.
151 -p passive, --print-passive
153 print all sentences phrased in the passive voice.
154 -N nominalizations, --print-nom
156 print all sentences containing nominalizations.
157 -n nominalizations-passive, --print-nom-passive
159 print all sentences phrased in the passive voice or containing
160 nominalizations.
161 -h, --help
163 Print a short usage message.
164 --version
166 Print the version.
167
169 On usage errors, 1 is returned. Termination caused by lack of memory
170 is signalled by exit code 2.
171
173 LC_MESSAGES=de|en|nl
174 specifies the default document language. The default language
175 is en.
176 LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1
178 specifies the document character set. The default character set
179 is ASCII.
180
182 This program is GNU software, copyright 1997–2007 Michael Haardt
183 <michael@moria.de>.
184 It contains contributions by Jason Petrone <jpetrone@acm.org>, Uschi
186 Stegemeier <uschi@morwain.de> and Hans Lodder.
187 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
189 under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
190 Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
191 option) any later version.
192 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
194 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MER‐
195 CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
196 Public License for more details.
197 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
199 with this program. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
200 Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
201
203 There was a style command on old UNIX systems, which is now part of the
204 AT&T DWB package. The original version was bound to roff by enforcing
205 a call to deroff.
206
208 deroff(1), diction(1)
209 Cherry, L.L.; Vesterman, W.: Writing Tools—The STYLE and DICTION pro‐
211 grams, Computer Science Technical Report 91, Bell Laboratories, Murray
212 Hill, N.J. (1981), republished as part of the 4.4BSD User's Supplemen‐
213 tary Documents by O'Reilly.
214 Coleman, M. and Liau,T.L. (1975). 'A computer readability formula de‐
216 signed for machine scoring', Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2),
217 283-284.
218GNU January 29, 2014 STYLE(1)