1DICTION(1) User commands DICTION(1)
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6 diction - print wordy and commonly misused phrases in sentences
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9 diction [-b] [-d] [-f file [-n|-L language]] [file...]
10 diction [--beginner] [--ignore-double-words] [--file file [--no-
11 default-file|--language language]] [file...]
12 diction -h|--help
13 diction --version
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16 Diction finds all sentences in a document that contain phrases from a
17 database of frequently misused, bad or wordy diction. It further
18 checks for double words. If no files are given, the document is read
19 from standard input. Each found phrase is enclosed in [ ] (brackets).
20 Suggestions and advice, if any and if asked for, are printed headed by
21 a right arrow ->. A sentence is a sequence of words, that starts with
22 a capitalised word and ends with a full stop, double colon, question
23 mark or exclaimation mark. A single letter followed by a dot is con‐
24 sidered an abbreviation, so it does not terminate a sentence. Various
25 multi-letter abbreviations are recognized, they do not terminate a sen‐
26 tence as well, neither do fractional numbers.
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28 Diction understands cpp(1) #line lines for being able to give precise
29 locations when printing sentences.
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32 -b, --beginner
33 Complain about mistakes typically made by beginners.
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35 -d, --ignore-double-words
36 Ignore double words and do not complain about them.
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38 -s, --suggest
39 Suggest better wording, if any.
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41 -f file, --file file
42 Read the user specified database from the specified file in
43 addition to the default database.
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45 -n, --no-default-file
46 Do not read the default database, so only the user-specified
47 database is used.
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49 -L language, --language language
50 Set the phrase file language (de, en, nl).
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52 -h, --help
53 Print a short usage message.
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55 --version
56 Print the version.
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59 On usage errors, 1 is returned. Termination caused by lack of memory
60 is signalled by exit code 2.
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63 The following example first removes all roff constructs and headers
64 from a document and feeds the result to diction with a German database:
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66 deroff -s file.mm | diction -L de | fmt
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69 LC_MESSAGES=de|en|nl
70 specifies the message language and is also used as default for
71 the phrase language. The default language is en.
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74 /usr/share/diction/* databases for various languages
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77 This program is GNU software, copyright 1997–2007 Michael Haardt
78 <michael@moria.de>.
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80 The english phrase file contains contributions by Greg Lindahl <lin‐
81 dahl@pbm.com>, Wil Baden, Gary D. Kline, Kimberly Hanks and Beth Mor‐
82 ris. The dutch phrase file was contributed by Hans Lodder.
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84 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
85 under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
86 Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
87 option) any later version.
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89 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
90 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MER‐
91 CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
92 Public License for more details.
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94 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
95 with this program. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
96 Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
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99 There has been a diction command on old UNIX systems, which is now part
100 of the AT&T DWB package. The original version was bound to roff by
101 enforcing a call to deroff. This version is a reimplementation and
102 must run in a pipe with deroff(1) if you want to process roff docu‐
103 ments. Similarly, you can run it in a pipe with dehtml(1) or detex(1)
104 to process HTML or TeX documents.
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107 deroff(1), fmt(1), style(1)
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109 Cherry, L.L.; Vesterman, W.: Writing Tools—The STYLE and DICTION pro‐
110 grams, Computer Science Technical Report 91, Bell Laboratories, Murray
111 Hill, N.J. (1981), republished as part of the 4.4BSD User's Supplemen‐
112 tary Documents by O'Reilly.
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114 Strunk, William: The elements of style, Ithaca, N.Y.: Priv. print.,
115 1918, http://coba.shsu.edu/help/strunk/
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119GNU August 30th, 2007 DICTION(1)