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/