Often, a text that has been written collaboratively does not ``speak with a single voice.'' Such a text is stylistically incongruous --- as opposed to merely stylistically inconsistent, which might or might not be deleterious to the quality of the text. This widespread problem reduces the overall quality of a text and reflects poorly on its authors. We would like to design a facility for revising style that augments the software environments in which collaborative writing takes place, but before doing so, a question must be answered: what is the role of subjectivity in stylistic assessment for a style-revision facility? We describe an experiment designed to measure the agreement between the stylistic assessments performed by a group of subjects, based on a free-sort of writing samples. The results show that there is a statistically significant level of agreement between the subjects' assessments and, furthermore, there was a small number of groupings (three) of even more similar stylistic assessments. The results also show the invalidity of using authorship as an indicator of the reader's perceptions of stylistic similarity between the writing samples.
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