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/