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

GNU                                             September 2, 2017                                     DICTION(1)