style(1)

1STYLE(1)                         User commands                        STYLE(1)
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NAME

6       style - analyse surface characteristics of a document
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SYNOPSIS

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
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DESCRIPTION

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.
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22       Numbers are counted as words  with  one  syllable.   A  sentence  is  a
23       sequence  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
30   Readability grades
31       Style understands cpp(1) #line lines for being  able  to  give  precise
32       locations when printing sentences.
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34       Kincaid formula
35              The  Kincaid  Formula has been developed for Navy training manu‐
36              als, that ranged in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3.  It is probably
37              best  applied  to  technical  documents,  because it is based on
38              adult training manuals rather than school  book  text.   Dialogs
39              (often  found  in fictional texts) are usually a series of short
40              sentences, which lowers the score.  On the  other  hand,  scien‐
41              tific  texts  with  many long scientific terms are rated higher,
42              although they are not necessarily harder to read for people  who
43              are familiar with those terms.
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45              Kincaid = 11.8*syllables/wds+0.39*wds/sentences-15.59
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47       Automated Readability Index
48              The Automated Readability Index is typically higher than Kincaid
49              and Coleman-Liau, but lower than Flesch.
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51              ARI = 4.71*chars/wds+0.5*wds/sentences-21.43
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53       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.
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57              Coleman-Liau = 5.88*chars/wds-29.5*sent/wds-15.8
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59       Flesh reading easy formula
60              The  Flesh  reading  easy formula has been developed by Flesh in
61              1948 and it is based on school text covering grade 3 to 12.   It
62              is  wide  spread, especially in the USA, because of good results
63              and simple computation.  The index is usually between  0  (hard)
64              and  100  (easy),  standard  English documents averages approxi‐
65              mately 60 to 70.  Applying  it  to  German  documents  does  not
66              deliver  good  results  because of the different language struc‐
67              ture.
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69              Flesch Index = 206.835-84.6*syll/wds-1.015*wds/sent
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71       Fog Index
72              The Fog index has been developed by Robert Gunning.   Its  value
73              is  a school grade.  The ``ideal'' Fog Index level is 7 or 8.  A
74              level above 12 indicates the writing sample is too hard for most
75              people  to read.  Only use it on texts of at least hundred words
76              to get meaningful results.  Note that a  correct  implementation
77              would not count words of three or more syllables that are proper
78              names, combinations of easy words, or made  three  syllables  by
79              suffixes such as –ed, –es, or –ing.
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81              Fog Index = 0.4*(wds/sent+100*((wds >= 3 syll)/wds))
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83       Lix formula
84              The  Lix formula developed by Björnsson from Sweden is very sim‐
85              ple and employs a mapping table as well:
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87              Lix = wds/sent+100*(wds >= 6 char)/wds
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89
90              Index         34   38   41   44   48   51    54    57
91              School year      5    6    7    8    9    10    11
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93       SMOG-Grading
94              The  SMOG-Grading  for  English  texts  has  been  developed  by
95              McLaughlin in 1969.  Its result is a school grade.
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97              SMOG-Grading = square root of (((wds >= 3 syll)/sent)*30) + 3
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99              It  has  been  adapted to German by Bamberger & Vanecek in 1984,
100              who changed the constant +3 to -2.
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102   Word usage
103       The word usage counts are intended to help identify  excessive  use  of
104       particular parts of speech.
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106       Verb Phrases
107              The  category  of verbs labeled "to be" identifies phrases using
108              the passive voice.  Use the passive voice sparingly, in favor of
109              more  direct  verb  forms.  The flag -p causes style to list all
110              occurrences of the passive voice.
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112       The verb category "aux" measures the use of modal auxiliary verbs, such
113       as "can", "could", and "should".  Modal auxiliary verbs modify the mood
114       of a verb.
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116       Conjunctions
117              The conjunctions counted by style are coordinating and  subordi‐
118              nating.  Coordinating conjunctions join grammatically equal sen‐
119              tence fragments, such as a noun with a noun,  a  phrase  with  a
120              phrase,  or a clause to a clause.  Coordinating conjunctions are
121              "and," "but," "or," "yet," and "nor."
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123       Subordinating conjunctions connect clauses of unequal status.  A subor‐
124       dinating  conjunction  links  a  subordinate clause, which is unable to
125       stand alone, to an independent clause.  Examples of subordinating  con‐
126       junctions are "because," "although," and "even if."
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128       Pronouns
129              Pronouns  are  contextual  references to nouns and noun phrases.
130              Documents with few pronouns generally lack cohesiveness and flu‐
131              idity.  Too many pronouns may indicate ambiguity.
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133       Nominalizations
134              Nominalizations are verbs that are changed to nouns.  Style rec‐
135              ognizes words that end in "ment," "ance," "ence,"  or  "ion"  as
136              nominalizations.   Examples  are  "endowment," "admittance," and
137              "nominalization."  Too much nominalization  in  a  document  can
138              sound  abstract  and  be  difficult  to understand.  The flag -N
139              causes style to list all nominalizations.  The  flag  -n  prints
140              all sentences with either the passive voice or a nominalization.
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OPTIONS

143       -L language, --language language
144              set the document language (de, en, nl).
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146       -l length, --print-long length
147              print all sentences longer than length words.
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149       -r ari, --print-ari ari
150              print  all  sentences  whose  readability index (ARI) is greater
151              than ari.
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153       -p passive, --print-passive
154              print all sentences phrased in the passive voice.
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156       -N nominalizations, --print-nom
157              print all sentences containing nominalizations.
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159       -n nominalizations-passive, --print-nom-passive
160              print all sentences  phrased in the passive voice or  containing
161              nominalizations.
162
163       -h, --help
164              Print a short usage message.
165
166       --version
167              Print the version.
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ERRORS

170       On  usage  errors, 1 is returned.  Termination caused by lack of memory
171       is signalled by exit code 2.
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ENVIRONMENT

174       LC_MESSAGES=de|en|nl
175              specifies the default document language.  The  default  language
176              is en.
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178       LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1
179              specifies the document character set.  The default character set
180              is ASCII.
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AUTHOR

183       This program  is  GNU  software,  copyright  1997–2007  Michael  Haardt
184       <michael@moria.de>.
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186       It  contains  contributions  by Jason Petrone <jpetrone@acm.org>, Uschi
187       Stegemeier <uschi@morwain.de> and Hans Lodder.
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189       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
190       under  the  terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
191       Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at  your
192       option) any later version.
193
194       This  program  is  distributed  in the hope that it will be useful, but
195       WITHOUT ANY  WARRANTY;  without  even  the  implied  warranty  of  MER‐
196       CHANTABILITY  or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General
197       Public License for more details.
198
199       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
200       with  this  program.   If  not,  write to the Free Software Foundation,
201       Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
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HISTORY

204       There has been a style command on old UNIX systems, which is  now  part
205       of  the  AT&T  DWB  package.  The original version was bound to roff by
206       enforcing a call to deroff.
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