DICTION(1) GNU DICTION(1)
User commands User commands
January 29, 2014
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.
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DICTION(1) GNU DICTION(1)
User commands User commands
January 29, 2014
--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 a
tab 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
explaination or start with an equal sign followed by text to match for
referring to the explaination of that text. The right part can
consist of an exclamation mark to mark exceptions that should not be
matched.
Empty lines or lines starting with a hash are ignored.
AUTHOR
This program is GNU software, copyright 19972017 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.
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DICTION(1) GNU DICTION(1)
User commands User commands
January 29, 2014
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
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