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 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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