NAME¶
style - analyse surface characteristics of a document
SYNOPSIS¶
style [
-L language] [
-l length] [
-r
ari] [
file...]
style [
--language language] [
--print-long
length] [
--print-ari ari] [
file...]
style -h|
--help
style --version
DESCRIPTION¶
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 was developed for U.S. Navy training manuals; it
ranges 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
- Flesch Reading Ease formula
- Developed by Rudolph Flesch in 1948, the Flesch Reading Ease formula is
based on school texts covering grades 3 to 12. It is widespread,
especially in the USA, because it is computed easily and produces good
results. The index ranges from 0 (hard) to 100 (easy). Standard English
documents average around 60 to 70. Applying it to German documents gives
bad results because of the different language structure.
Flesch Index = 206.835-84.6*syll/wds-1.015*wds/sent
- Fog Index
- The Fog index was 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. Texts
less than 100 words will not produce 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 Björnsson 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 was developed by McLaughlin in 1969.
Its result is a school grade.
SMOG Grading = square root of (((wds >= 3 syll)/sent)*30) + 3
It was adapted to German by Bamberger and 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¶
- -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.
ERRORS¶
On usage errors, 1 is returned. Termination caused by lack of memory is
signalled by exit code 2.
ENVIRONMENT¶
- 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.
AUTHOR¶
This program is GNU software, copyright 1997–2007 Michael Haardt
<michael@moria.de>.
It contains contributions by Jason Petrone <jpetrone@acm.org>, Uschi
Stegemeier <uschi@morwain.de> and Hans Lodder.
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 3 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.
Coleman, M. and Liau,T.L. (1975). 'A computer readability formula designed for
machine scoring', Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 283-284.