   Welcome to the STYLE-CHECK tutorial.

    This document contains a large number of style faults to illustrate the
    many features of the programme.

    Actually, you could say there is a scenario of an ongoing fault
    situation, which necessitates a prioritising of time to normalise the
    document.

    STYLE-CHECK will warn you of many style faults in a sentence.

    Some writers write sentences which go on and on, containing many clauses
    and phrases, just in case they have missed something out, but when you
    come to the end of the sentence, you can no longer remember what it was
    all about, and you have to read it again.

    Other writers write sentences in which there is not a single
    punctuation mark other than a full stop at the end.

    Conversely, there are writers who use every comma, semi-colon, hyphen,
    dash, full stop and round, square and fancy brackets they can.

    There are those whose penmanship propagates the most erudite outpourings
    of the innermost emotions, or perhaps just inconsequential and
    unmeaningful verbiage?

    STYLE-CHECK will warn you of other possible faults.

    It will warn you if the passive form has been used in your document.

    Usually the active form is simpler and more direct.

    It will alert you to every use of an apostrophe, so that you can check
    for correct use.

    You shouldn't use abbreviations like shouldn't if it is not part of
    direct speech.

    Look for the quotation marks!
    
    Is it "the children's book" or "the childrens' book"?

    There are some grammarians who regard it to be a style fault if a
    sentence begins with a conjunction, or ends with a preposition.

    And there are others who do not.

    Including, perhaps, the mother who asked her daughter a question at
    bedtime.
    
    "What did you choose that book to be read to out of for?"

    STYLE-CHECK will warn you if you repeat words in a sentence, as in the
    following sentence from R.D. Laing, "The Politics of Experience".

    "I cannot avoid trying to understand your experience, because although I
    do not experience your experience, which is invisible to me (and
    non-tasteable, non-touchable, non-smellable, and inaudible), yet I
    experience you as experiencing."

    While you have been working through this tutorial, you will have noticed
    that there have been comments on individual words.

    Some of them you may have thought to be irrelevant and others cryptic.

    You will find additional information on these words in the appendix to
    the manual.

    Nevertheless these comments can often be useful.

    Can you find the style faults in the next 10 sentences?

    1: The general liquidated the rival army and decimated over half the
    civilian population.

    2: Play was stopped due to rain, which also affected rail traffic.

    3: He flaunted every rule in the book.

    4: The task of the STYLE-CHECK user consists of using the programme to
    improve his writing.

    5: Please inform me if there is a change in the regulations.

    6: Neither Mr. Smith nor his wife were present when the department was
    celebrating their award.

    7: By the bored look on his face I knew that he was disinterested in my
    dilemma over which of the three candidates was the most suitable.

    8: My wife together with my parents only eat fish on fridays.

    9: The majority of the councillors were appalled at the enormity of the
    deficit, but the mayor stated that it was the result of fairly unique
    circumstances.

    10: Following your completion of this tutorial, I hope you will have
    become a protagonist of style checking and that you will now try using
    STYLE-CHECK on some of your own documents before you terminate your use
    of the programme.

    That's it!

    On the STYLE-CHECK disk you will find a number of text files.

    PROBATION_DOC is a genuine 1968 vintage probation order, that is worth
    reading if only for the language use, which almost gives STYLE-CHECK a
    nervous breakdown.

    BOMB_TXT is taken from a disk of humorous texts available from the SJPD
    public domain library.

    APPENDIX_DOC is an ASCII version of the appendix to the STYLE-CHECK
    manual.
