Diction
Diction refers to word use; a dictionary is full of words. The choice of the wording characterizes a passage of writing. Observe this from a story by Zora Neale Hurston:
"Wait till I light up my coal-pot and I'll tell you about this Zigaboo called Jelly."
Is the passage formal or informal? High, medium or low diction (academic and stilted, informational and mundane, or casual and common).
The words "till," "coal-pot," "I'll," "Zigaboo," and "Jelly" bring a casual, familiar and colorful feeling to the sentence. The style is a story telling style, warm ("coal-pot" and "you"), intimate("till," "I'll tell you), and comic("Zigaboo named Jelly").
The reader is alerted immediately by style. This is not a treatise on mathematics. It is not an opinion piece on the death penalty. It is not a repair manual or an encyclopedia article.
We know much of this through diction.
Look at this beginning from Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms:
"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels"
Is the passage formal or informal? High, medium or low diction (academic and stilted, informational and mundane, or casual and common).
The diction is informational, mundane. There is so little character - yet - that the subject cannot be told by the new reader. Information is given in every day, clear, understandable words. Hemingway continues issuing facts and description in the same style for another four paragraphs during which the ordinance of war within this natural landscape is described. He then ends with this factual description:
"At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army."
In the same informational - journalistic - style, Hemingway delivers, carefully and calmly, the horrid news of seven thousand deaths! The style accentuates, through understatement, the horror of the war.
Now, look at a short passage from Jonathan Kozol's Still Separate, Still Unequal.
"Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years."
This is formal language - syntax says so, but more about that later. The diction is not difficult nor particularly stilted, but it is academic and would not be found in either of the foregoing pieces. Words such as "rather vague," "general impression," "racial isolation," "grave," "realities," "urban public schools," and "diminished" carry a colder tone than Hurston's language, a higher tone than the everyday words in Hemingway. The words reinforce the seriousness of the subject - at least serious to Kozol - and the thoroughness with which he plans to carry out his investigation.
