Let the grain sizes of a sediment, in phi units, have the distribution given by the weight in each class. Its mean grain size is the mean of that distribution, and its sorting is the spread of the distribution, measured by its standard deviation in phi units: a sediment is well sorted when its grains are nearly all of one size, and poorly sorted when they cover many classes. Both are computed either from the percentages in the classes, by the method of moments, or from the cumulative curve, by the graphic measures of Folk:
where is the size in phi units than which per cent of the sample is coarser.