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/