STYLE(1)                                                           User commands                                                          STYLE(1)

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, sen-
       tences 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 = 5.89*chars/wds-0.3*sentences/(100*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  wide-
              spread,  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  dif-
              ferent 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 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 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  nomi-
              nalizations.   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.

       -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
              specifies the 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 1997-2005 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  MER-
       CHANTABILITY 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.

GNU                                                                June 09, 2006                                                          STYLE(1)