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

       The  file  consists of lines, one per entry.  Each line is divided by one or two tabs into
       two parts: Left is the text to match and right is  the  suggestion.   The  text  to  match
       either  starts with a space to match a full word or with letters to match suffixes.  If it
       ends with a tilde, it matches a prefix.

       The suggestion may be empty to mark fill words, contain an explanation or  start  with  an
       equal  sign  followed by text to match for referring to the explanation of that text.  The
       right part can consist of an exclamation mark  to  mark  exceptions  that  should  not  be
       matched.

       If  both parts are separated by two tabs, then this entry concerns mistakes typically made
       by beginners.

       Empty lines or lines starting with a hash are ignored.

AUTHOR

       This program is GNU software, copyright 1997–2017 Michael Haardt <michael@moria.de>.

       The English phrase file contains contributions by Wil Baden, Kimberly Hanks Gary D. Kline,
       Greg Lindahl <lindahl@pbm.com>, Beth Morris and Jeremy C. Reed.  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/

       There   is  a  huge  and  actively  maintained  Standard  American  English  database  at:
       https://mrsatterly.com/diction.html