DICTION(1) GNU DICTION(1)
User commands User commands
February 25, 2002
NAME
diction - print wordy and commonly misused phrases in sentences
SYNOPSIS
diction [-f file [-n|-L language]] [file...]
diction [--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, 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.
Diction understands cpp(1) #line lines for being able to give precise
locations when printing sentences.
OPTIONS
-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.
-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
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DICTION(1) GNU DICTION(1)
User commands User commands
February 25, 2002
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
specifies the message language and is also used as default for
the phrase language. The default language is en.
FILES
/opt/diction/share/diction/* databases for various languages
AUTHOR
This program is GNU software, copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
2002 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.
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 2 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.
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.
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DICTION(1) GNU DICTION(1)
User commands User commands
February 25, 2002
Strunk, William: The elements of style, Ithaca, N.Y.: Priv. print.,
1918, http://coba.shsu.edu/help/strunk/
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