Highlights unclear or wordy sentences.
The diction command finds all sentences in an English-language document that contain phrases from a database of unclear or wordy diction. Each phrase is bracketed with [ ] (brackets). Because the diction command runs the deroff command before looking at the text, include header files that contain appropriate formatting information as part of the input. The explain command provides an interactive thesaurus for the phrases found by the diction command.
Use of nonstandard formatting macros may cause incorrect sentence breaks. In particular, the diction command does not understand the -me flag.
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| -f PatternFile | Specifies a file containing examples of unclear diction; this file is used in addition to the default file. |
| -ml | Causes the deroff command to skip mm macro lists; can be used if a document contains many lists of sentence fragments. |
| -mm | Overrides the default ms macro package. |
| -n | Suppresses the use of the default file when used with the -f flag; only the file specified by the PatternFile parameter is used. |
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| /usr/lib/dict.d | Contains default pattern. |