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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.

       -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
              specifies the message language and is also used as  default  for
              the phrase language.  The default language is en.

FILES

       /usr/share/diction/*     databases for various languages

AUTHOR

       This  program  is  GNU  software,  copyright  1997–2005  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.

       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 2 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  ToolsThe  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/