The paper presents investigations concerning the decision rule filtering process controlled by the estimated relevance of available attributes. In the conducted study, two search directions were used, sequential forward selection and sequential backward elimination. The steps of sequential search were governed by three rankings obtained for variables, all related to characteristics of data and rules that can be induced, as follows, (i) a ranking based on the weighting factor referring to the occurrence of attributes in generated decision reducts, (ii) the OneR ranking exploiting short rule properties, and (iii) the proposed ranking defined through the operation of greedy algorithm for rule induction. The three rankings were confronted and compared from the perspective of their usefulness for the selection of rules performed in the two directions and with two strategies for rule selection. The resulting sets of rules were analysed with respect to the properties of the constituent decision rules and from the point of performance for all constructed rule-based classifiers. Substantial experiments were carried out in the stylometric domain, treating the task of authorship attribution as classification. The results obtained indicate that for all three rankings and search paths it was possible to obtain a noticeable reduction of attributes while at least maintaining the power of inducers, at the same time improving characteristics of rule sets.