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DICTION(1)                       User commands                      DICTION(1)


NAME

       diction - print wordy and commonly misused phrases in sentences


SYNOPSIS

       diction [-b] [-d] [-f file [-n|-L language]] [file...]
       diction [--beginner] [--ignore-double-words] [--file file
       [--no-default-file|--language language]] [file...]
       diction -h|--help
       diction --version


DESCRIPTION

       Diction finds all sentences in a document that contain phrases from a
       database of frequently misused, bad or wordy diction.  It further
       checks for double words.  If no files are given, the document is read
       from standard input.  Each found phrase is enclosed in [ ] (brackets).
       Suggestions and advice, if any and if asked for, are printed headed by
       a right arrow ->.  A sentence is a sequence of words, that starts with
       a capitalised word and ends with a full stop, double colon, question
       mark or exclaimation mark.  A single letter followed by a dot is
       considered an abbreviation, so it does not terminate a sentence.
       Various multi-letter abbreviations are recognized, they do not
       terminate a sentence as well, neither do fractional numbers.

       Diction understands cpp(1) #line lines for being able to give precise
       locations when printing sentences.


OPTIONS

       -b, --beginner
              Complain about mistakes typically made by beginners.

       -d, --ignore-double-words
              Ignore double words and do not complain about them.

       -s, --suggest
              Suggest better wording, if any.

       -f file, --file file
              Read the user specified database from the specified file in
              addition to the default database.

       -n, --no-default-file
              Do not read the default database, so only the user-specified
              database is used.

       -L language, --language language
              Set the phrase file language (de, en, nl).

       -h, --help
              Print a short usage message.

       --version
              Print the version.


ERRORS

       On usage errors, 1 is returned.  Termination caused by lack of memory
       is signalled by exit code 2.


EXAMPLE

       The following example first removes all roff constructs and headers
       from a document and feeds the result to diction with a German database:

              deroff -s file.mm | diction -L de | fmt


ENVIRONMENT

       LC_MESSAGES=de|en|nl
              specifies the message language and is also used as default for
              the phrase language.  The default language is en.


FILES

       ${prefix}/share/diction/*     databases for various languages


AUTHOR

       This program is GNU software, copyright 1997-2007 Michael Haardt
       <michael@moria.de>.

       The english phrase file contains contributions by Greg Lindahl
       <lindahl@pbm.com>, Wil Baden, Gary D. Kline, Kimberly Hanks and Beth
       Morris.  The dutch phrase file was contributed by Hans Lodder.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
       Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
       option) any later version.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
       WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
       MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
       General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
       with this program.  If not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
       Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.


HISTORY

       There has been a diction command on old UNIX systems, which is now part
       of the AT&T DWB package.  The original version was bound to roff by
       enforcing a call to deroff.  This version is a reimplementation and
       must run in a pipe with deroff(1) if you want to process roff
       documents.  Similarly, you can run it in a pipe with dehtml(1) or
       detex(1) to process HTML or TeX documents.


SEE ALSO

       deroff(1), fmt(1), style(1)

       Cherry, L.L.; Vesterman, W.: Writing Tools--The STYLE and DICTION
       programs, Computer Science Technical Report 91, Bell Laboratories,
       Murray Hill, N.J. (1981), republished as part of the 4.4BSD User's
       Supplementary Documents by O'Reilly.

       Strunk, William: The elements of style, Ithaca, N.Y.: Priv. print.,
       1918, http://coba.shsu.edu/help/strunk/

GNU                            August 30th, 2007                    DICTION(1)

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