Provided by: diction_1.11-1_amd64 bug

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.