diction prints wordy and commonly misused phrases in sentences.
This document was produced for version 1.11 of gnu diction.
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, 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 #line lines for being
able to give precise locations when printing sentences.
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 if you want to process roff documents. Similarly, you can run it in a pipe with dehtml or detex to process HTML or TeX documents.
See also:
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/.
Diction's behaviour is affected by the following environment variables.
LC_MESSAGESLC_MESSAGES locale, which determines
the language that diction uses for messages. American English
is used if the environment variable is not set, or if the message catalog
is not installed, or if diction was not compiled with national
language support (nls). The variable is further used as default
for the phrase language.
$prefix/share/dictionIf no errors occur, exit status is 0. On usage errors, 1 is returned. Termination caused by lack of memory is signalled by exit code 2.
If you find a bug in diction, please send electronic mail to michael@moria.de. Include the version number, which you can find by running diction --version. Also include the hardware and operating system, the compiler used to compile `diction', a description of the bug behavior, and the input to `diction' that triggered the bug.
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 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.
This is a general index of all issues discussed in this manual, with the exception of the diction command-line options.
This is an alphabetical list of all diction command-line options and environment variables.