The study of comparative stylistics attempts to catalogue and explain the differences in style between languages. Rules of comparative stylistics are commonly presented in textbooks of translation as simple rules of thumb, but in order to incorporate a knowledge of comparative stylistics into machine translation systems, a more systematic approach has to be taken. The authors developed a formal model of comparative syntactic stylistics to be used as a component of a general computational theory of style. They adapt textbook rules of human translation and study a small corpus of French-English translations to determine how these informal rules can be represented in their model as formal rules of translation. Their model of comparative stylistics could be implemented in a machine translation system, enabling the system to make a more informed decision about possible translation choices and their potential stylistic effects.