[school-discuss] style and diction

[Dennis Daniels <ddaniels@magic.fr>]

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