Re: [school-discuss] style and diction

[jeff williams <cfiaime@cfiaime.com>]

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