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diction(1) General Commands Manual diction(1) NAME diction, explain, suggest - Prints wordy sentences and looks them up in an interactive thesaurus. SYNOPSIS diction [-fpattern_file] [-k] [-ma] [-me] [-ml] [-ms] [-n] [file...] explain suggest The diction command finds all sentences in an English language document that contain phrases from a database of bad or wordy diction. The ex- plain command is an interactive thesaurus for the English language phrases found by the diction command and only for those phrases. The diction command reads from standard in if no file operand is pro- vided. The suggest command is a synonym for explain. OPTIONS Names a user-created pattern file to be used in addition to the default file. Passes the -k option to the deroff command. The -k option keeps blocks of text specified nroff by requests or macros; for example, the request. Passes the -ma option to deroff. The -ma option interprets nroff man macros only. Overrides the default nroff -ms macro package. Causes deroff to skip lists; should be used if a document contains many lists of nonsentences. Overrides the default nroff -ms macro package. Suppresses use of the default file (used with -f). Only the user-cre- ated pattern file is used. DESCRIPTION Each phrase found by the diction command is enclosed in [ ] (brackets). Because diction runs deroff before looking at the text, include format- ting header files as part of the input. Before using the explain command, use the diction command to obtain a list of poorly worded phrases. When you use the explain command, the system prompts you for a phrase and responds with a grammatically ac- ceptable alternative. You can continue typing phrases, or you can exit by pressing the End-of-File key sequence. The explain command can also take input redirected from a file. No other command line arguments are valid. NOTES Use of nonstandard formatting macros may cause incorrect sentence breaks. In particular, diction does not understand -me. FILES Default pattern file. Thesaurus used by the explain command. SEE ALSO Commands: deroff(1), nroff(1) diction(1)