In the past day I wrote a couple of text for work and private purposes. And today I made use of the CLI tools diction and style that should help me to make some text I wrote better. What can I say? Those do! As a non native English speaker it is sometimes hard to find mistakes and at least for English diction was of great help for me. Both are well known “old” standard UNIX commands.
How to use it? Just convert your text to pure *.txt if you not already have it. Then fire up a command line interface. Since I run KDE I prefer Yakuake because of its easiness.
Then I first used style to get an overview over my text.
Just enter:
style -L en "input_text_file.txt"
The output will help you to understand if changes in the sentences may be useful. But remember you still have to decide yourself. If you consent proceed with diction to find misused, bad or wordy diction.
Enter:
diction diction -L en -s "input_text_file.txt"
The “-s” option will make some suggestions for better wording (if there are any). This will also help you to understand what might be wrong with your text.
The output will be shown in stdout (screen usually). If you want to have it in a new text file just enter:
diction diction -L en -s "input_text_file.txt" ~> "new_text_file.txt"
Nevertheless, don’t expect any wonder. These tools are just an aid for lazy writers.
