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Re: [school-discuss] style and diction



Hi Jeff at et. al.,

The response to this application in the class has been amazing. Some of my students took on the task of reaching my somewhat arbitrary goals of
1.5 syllables per word
Kincaid score of 10
25 sentences
5 paragraphs
with some gusto. I've never had students stay after school to hone a paper but that's exactly what's been happening! They are using it like a video game! They keep changing words around to get 'a higher score'! Of course, there are those that abuse it and switch words around using the thesaurus... my favorite, almost non-sensical, phrase so far has been 'untainted aptitude' for perfect skill. :)

I'm going to switch the scales to:
7-10 on the kincaid
25+ sentences
5 paragraphs minimum
1.5 syllables
20% passive sentences


The kincaid goes higher with passive sentences and that's a shame. And, as an English teacher I'm constantly fighting with pronouns so I'm toying with two-four pronouns as a benchmark...


I've been using readability.info for the 'grading' process. I need to install diction and style on my server at school!

There must be other style and grammar apps out there in the OS world... what are others using? Please share! The interest and enthusiasm for the little 'report' / 'game' of 'diction' has been amazing!

Dennis


jeff williams wrote:
Greetings,

Style and Diction are clones of the old AT&T Writers' Workbench. I used several versions of WWB whilst at Bell Labs in the 1980s and dearly loved the product.

The grade level calculations, if memory serves, are based on sentance length, multi-syllable words, and subordinate clauses. According to the theory, at least, 50 percent of the people at the end of a given grade can read or write at that grade level. Actually, people tend to get stuck at the 6.5 to 7.5 level. Trying to write for an 8+ grade level will actually make your students write in a style that will not communicate well to the masses.

I'm relying on memory here, a class in writing which was given by Dr. Donald Pratt of Princeton when he was under contract to AT&T. If memory serves, fiction ought to be towards the lower end of the scale (7.0 or so), while technical writing can be 10.5 or that area. Academic writing seems to hang between 12 and 15. IBM technical manuals for the System 360 ran about 22, which explains why no one read them.

IMHO, worrying about the grade level, Flesch counts, fog counts, etc., and going for a certain target may be counter productive. Making the students aware of the grade level, Flesch counts, fog counts, etc., is a good thing. That certainly can help in writing.

Oh, yes, your grade level seems to go up as you employ passives in your writing. Third person writing is both awkward to write and difficult to read. Indeed, asking your students to write in an active voice is one of the best things you can do.

Occasionally I will run my work through the style and diction programs. It's very interesting, to say the least. For example, the following is the style output for my dissertation proposal:
readability grades:
Kincaid: 10.2
ARI: 11.1
Coleman-Liau: 13.1
Flesch Index: 55.5
Fog Index: 13.5
Lix: 48.2 = school year 9
SMOG-Grading: 12.1
sentence info:
47615 characters
9708 words, average length 4.90 characters = 1.56 syllables
514 sentences, average length 18.9 words
46% (237) short sentences (at most 14 words)
15% (79) long sentences (at least 29 words)
25 paragraphs, average length 20.6 sentences
5% (29) questions
47% (246) passive sentences
longest sent 134 wds at sent 2; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 26
word usage:
verb types:
to be (335) auxiliary (219) types as % of total:
conjunctions 5% (450) pronouns 5% (443) prepositions 11% (1056)
nominalizations 3% (317)
sentence beginnings:
pronoun (48) interrogative pronoun (9) article (46)
subordinating conjunction (31) conjunction (3) preposition (27)
=======================================================

I've also written a textbook on computer applications ("Tools for Communications, " http://www.cs.cuw.edu/csc/csc175/cs175book.pdf ). The counts for the book are also included.readability grades:
Kincaid: 8.4
ARI: 8.3
Coleman-Liau: 10.0
Flesch Index: 67.2
Fog Index: 11.6
Lix: 39.8 = school year 6
SMOG-Grading: 10.7
sentence info:
182410 characters
41588 words, average length 4.39 characters = 1.43 syllables
2295 sentences, average length 18.1 words
44% (1026) short sentences (at most 13 words)
11% (257) long sentences (at least 28 words)
142 paragraphs, average length 16.2 sentences
2% (47) questions
50% (1153) passive sentences
longest sent 267 wds at sent 1104; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 306
word usage:
verb types:
to be (1418) auxiliary (711) types as % of total:
conjunctions 4% (1754) pronouns 4% (1534) prepositions 9% (3648)
nominalizations 2% (765)
sentence beginnings:
pronoun (236) interrogative pronoun (34) article (184)
subordinating conjunction (96) conjunction (14) preposition (112)
===========================================================

I find both diction and style to be good tools. Let us know your opinion after you have experimented with them.



On Sunday 18 April 2004 10:55 am, Dennis Daniels wrote:

I've recently discovered 'style' and 'diction'
http://www.linuxforum.com/linux-cookbook/cookbook_15.html

Both look very exciting! I'm an English teacher with a k12ltsp lab that
I built with scrappy hardware and a lot of help from my local LUG.

I'd like to know if there are any English teachers on this list using OS
and/or any teachers on this list are using 'style' or 'diction' on a
regular basis in the grading process.

Does anyeone use style's grade level scaling as a determiner for
acceptability? I'm going to test it this week, but I'm considering
telling all of my students I won't accept any papers that have less than
an 8th grade writing level on their papers.

Having played with both apps I'm thoroughly convinced I can reduce the
number of first-draft essays. Students can check their papers using
http://readability.info/ They'll cheat of course and tell me the scale
is over 8, so I'd like to hear instances of how people are using either
style or diction to sift the low-level papers out of the stack.

Any thoughts on this? Pros/ cons/ tips/ tricks?

best
Dennis