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diction

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 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

@DATADIR@/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.

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