Stiilistest

Stiilistest refers to the systematic testing and evaluation of stylistic features in text or communication. The term is used in Estonian-language contexts to denote the process of assessing how closely a text adheres to a prescribed style or how its style compares across authors, genres, or brands. It is derived from stiil (style) and the suffix -test, indicating an assessment.

In practice, stiilistest can be applied in literary analysis, branding, and computational linguistics. In literary work, it helps scholars analyze formality, voice, tone, and rhetoric. In branding and corporate communications, stiilistest assesses consistency with a brand's voice and guidelines, and in NLP research it supports authorship attribution, style transfer evaluation, and readability studies.

Typical methods include quantitative metrics such as lexical diversity, average sentence length, syntactic complexity, modal and evaluative language, and readability scores, combined with qualitative expert judgments. Experimental designs may involve rating studies, blinded evaluations, or corpus-based style profiling, often using benchmarks and reference corpora.

Limitations include lack of universal standards for what constitutes stylistic conformity, language- and genre-dependence, and potential subjectivity in judgments. As a niche term, stiilistest is primarily used within specific linguistic, branding, or digital humanities contexts and may not have a single canonical methodology.