STYLE(1)

💅 style(1) — the vibe-checker for your writing 💅

User commands 🎀 GNU

okay bestie, gather round, because this one is iconic — it's a whole tool that looks at how you write and gives you the receipts. not the content, the surface, the ~aesthetic~ of your prose. readability grades, word lengths, sentence lengths, paragraph lengths, the whole thing. and it can drag specific sentences for you if you ask nicely. let's get into it 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

style — analyse surface characteristics of a document. that's it, that's the job. 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

style [-L language] [-l length] [-r ari] [file...]
style [--language language] [--print-long length] [--print-ari ari]
[file...]
style -h|--help
style --version

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so what does style actually do? it analyses the surface characteristics of the writing style of a document. it prints various readability grades, plus the length of words, sentences and paragraphs. it can further locate sentences with certain characteristics. no cap.

if you don't give it any files, it just reads the document from standard input. very demure, very flexible. 💖

now here's the grammar tea, because the counting rules are specific:

• Numbers are counted as words with one syllable. yeah.
• 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 too, and they also don't end a sentence. (not me getting credit for "e.g." 💀)
• A paragraph consists of two or more new line characters.

🌈 Readability grades 🌈

fun fact: style understands cpp(1) #line lines so it can give you precise locations when it's printing sentences. obsessed.

🌸 Kincaid formula 🌸

the Kincaid Formula was developed for U.S. Navy training manuals, and it ranges in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3. it's probably best applied to technical documents, because it's 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 get rated higher, even though they're not necessarily harder to read for people who already know those terms. so, y'know, context matters, bestie. 🧚

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 poor 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. and note this, it's important: 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. so yeah, this one's got some known caveats. 😭

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. it's giving grammar detective energy.

🌸 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. balance, bestie, it's all about balance. ⚖️

🌸 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.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -L language, --language language — set the document language (de, en, nl). pick your era, pick your language. 🌍
• -l length, --print-long length — print all sentences longer than length words. callout post for your run-on sentences. 😭
• -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. the passive voice is right there, being listed.
• -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. the combo meal. 🍓
• -h, --help — print a short usage message.
• --version — print the version.

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✨ ERRORS ✨

on usage errors, 1 is returned. termination caused by lack of memory is signalled by exit code 2. (we do not speak of the memory thing. 💀)

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✨ 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.

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✨ 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.

legal bestie note: that warranty disclaimer is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it is not a vibe, it's a binding legal statement. no cap. ⚠️

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✨ HISTORY ✨

there was 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. the lore is real. 📜

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✨ 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.

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and that's the whole page, bestie — GNU, September 2, 2017 edition. go forth, run style on your essay, and let the ARI read you for filth. slay 💅✨🦋