What is DICTION?
DICTION is a computer-aided text analysis program for Windows® and Mac® that uses a series of dictionaries to search a passage for five semantic features—Activity, Optimism, Certainty, Realism and Commonality—as well as thirty-five sub-features. DICTION uses predefined dictionaries and can also deploy up to thirty custom dictionaries (created by the user) for more targeted research purposes.
Certainty
Language indicating resoluteness, inflexibility, and completeness and a tendency to speak ex cathedra
activity
Language featuring movement, change, the implementation of ideas and the avoidance of inertia
optimism
Language endorsing some person, group, concept or event, or highlighting their positive entailments
realism
Language describing tangible, immediate, recognizable matters that affect people’s everyday lives
Commonality
Language highlighting the agreed-upon values of a group and rejecting idiosyncratic modes of engagement
INCREDIBLY FAST
DICTION 7, now with Power Mode, can read a variety of text formats and can accept a large number of files within a single project. Projects containing over 1000 files are analyzed using power analysis for enhanced speed and reporting efficiency, with results automatically exported to a .csv-formatted spreadsheet file.
INSTANT COMPARISONS
The program uses a built-in database consisting of thousands of previously analyzed tests. The user may apply these general norms or select from among thirty-six sub-categories, including speeches, poetry, newspaper editorials, business reports, scientific documents, television scripts, telephone conversations, etc., to get a comparative “snapshot” of their findings.
CONVENIENT OUTPUT
DICTION writes the results to numeric files for later statistical analysis. Output options include raw totals, standardized scores, word and character counts and percentages, thereby providing the user with a variety of ways of understanding the text being analyzed.
