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style - analyse surface characteristics of a document
style [-L language] [-l length] [-r ari] [file...]
style [--language language] [--print-long length] [--print-ari ari] [file...]
style -h|--help
style --version
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.
Style understands cpp(1)
#line lines for being able to give precise
locations when printing sentences.
- Kincaid formula
- The Kincaid Formula has
been developed for Navy training manuals, that ranged 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.
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