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Deciding on diction Vocabulary choices define you and your…
Deciding on diction
Vocabulary choices define you and your characters
WE ARE THE WORDS that tell who we are,” wrote poet Eduardo Galleano. He could have been talking about diction, because nothing so quickly defines a person as the words they choose from all the levels and shades that a language offers. No one hearing Lolita’s Humbert Humbert speak a few sentences could confuse him with Huckleberry Finn, any more than Sancho Panza’s diction could pass for Don Quixote’s.
Diction, or overall word choice, is a partly natural, partly conscious effort for most people. They acquire their general diction from parents, peers, teachers, etc., favoring certain aspects to become, say, plain-spoken, super-cool or silver-tongued. But they may find this diction inappropriate for particular audiences and choose to alter it, to put on a verbal costume. “A pleasure to meet you,” is the dressed-up diction for an employer. “Yo, wa’s up?” goes down with da boyz in the hood.
For writers, diction is always purposeful, always a costume donned for one effect or another. In each new work, it proclaims the narrator’s intended personality and point of view. It spins characters out of thin air, shades everything that is spoken, leads readers between the lines, sets the mood of the performance and shapes emotional responses to it.
The vocabulary choices in Graham Smith’s Last Orders are far cries from the author’s natural, Cambridge-influenced diction. But Smith let the dictions of his working-class characters express their sentiments. Among the narrators are earthy Ray and the lyrical Vic:
Ray: “Bernie pulls me a pint and puts it in front of me. He looks at me … with his loose, doggy face but he can tell I don’t want no chit-chat.”
Vic: A warship “would rear up howling and hissing, ice like marzipan on the forward deck, the bows plunging and whacking … the swing and judder of steel.”
And so on, as each character reveals nuances of personality with distinctive word choices.
Tilting toward a type
FOR THE BULK of their expression, members of a society draw on a common lexicon. In this shared vocabulary are thousands of workaday words, along with the most popular words from much-heard dictions such as teenage, corporate, religious and rural. The type of words individuals habitually choose from outside the common group tilts them toward a particular diction: “I want you to chill.” “I want you to exercise stress control.” “I want you to still the anguish that lies upon your soul.”
Overall, vocabulary is usually a blend of dictions, hard to pin down to one type. But key choices can be tracked along any number of spectrums, including vulgar to eloquent and concise to verbose. We may hear of good and bad diction, correct and incorrect, but such judgments tend to be elitist. Right vs. wrong diction has to do only with purpose. A sermon might call for high-flown diction. But imagine a manual that reads, “Conjoin securely the flare nut with the fitting lest they come asunder.” Plumb wrong.
Much of the old class prejudice against “lower” vocabulary has faded, and many writers now pepper educated diction with colloquialisms and slang: “Yeah, what an antiestablishment wack-job,” writes Arianna Huffington in Salon.
Dictions also range along the spectrums of formal/informal, concrete/abstract and assertive /timid, to name just a few. Scholars document these ranges (including male/female) in a given work, and readers sense them. But authors, as free as gods to choose any diction, must decide which will yield the desired effect.
So many choices
AH, THOSE exhilarating decisions writers face at the outset of a work! Past tense or present? First person or third? And now, add the matter of diction. How will the characters’ word choices reveal them? How should the narrator speak and thus appear? An intelligent vernacular? A street-smart eloquence? A politically correct academese? Should the author’s own diction be natural, mixed or alien?
For writers, the main challenges are:
Choosing dictions that are appropriate to the topic and audience Breezy slang in a history of smallpox? Ugh. Literary diction in a sports story? Yes, done all the time–but for sophisticated audiences. (Poetic diction, by the way, in the sense of bower, quoth, dovewinged and other archaisms, has been pretty much ruled inappropriate for any purpose other than laughs.)
Making the diction authentic or authentic sounding “Write what you know” applies here–or what you can research or guess at convincingly. Modernisms should not creep into period diction unless there’s a farcical element at play.
Choosing dictions that can deliver intended meanings Don’t box yourself into a type that lacks the nuances you will need.
Fiction writers who develop profiles for each character–parentage, schooling, jobs, travels, etc.–might consider how much of this background will bear on the character’s diction. A common pitfall is in consistency: Child narrators slide into a vocabulary beyond their years. Laconic toughs suddenly wax poetic to get the author’s point across. It can also be tricky to deliver visceral meanings in a consistently lofty diction. In The Remains of the Day, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro pulled it off, fine-tuning the vocabulary of Stevens, the butler and narrator, to an aspiring upper-class British English:
I must say this business of bantering is not a duty I feel I can ever discharge with enthusiasm…. One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.
This unvaryingly restrained diction delivered the novel’s gut-level feelings, perhaps more touchingly than a passionate one might have done.
Diction gives rise to tone and greatly affects overall style. Its personality comes from phrases, usages and grammatical choices as well as single words. In her short story “Cakewalk,” Lee Smith
serves up a Southern variety:
She’s always making those cakes. You can see her going through town carrying them so careful, her tired plump little face all crackled up and smiling, those Adidas just skimming the ground.
Dictions also can be built on cliches, circumlocutions and mannerisms, as Charles Dickens knew so well. But most telling are the words themselves, selected from a wealth of options for such qualities as precision, connotation and association. Should one use “inmate,” “detainee,” “prisoner” or “con”? Every time writers go to a thesaurus or spin alternative words in their minds, a diction-related decision is on the line.
Tarquin Winot, narrator of John Lanchester’s Debt to Pleasure, is a voluptuary of impeccable tastes in food, with “impeccably correct” diction (as the dust jacket suggests). But Lanchester slowly reveals the true Tarquin through his “poisonously opinionated” vocabulary:
The menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art.
Chtonic? Doesn’t that refer to the dark spirits of the underworld? One begins to wonder …
Diction defines a more benign but troubled narrator in “Screenwriter,” a New Yorker story by Charles D’Ambrosio. The dark, metaphorical words of a suicidal mind meets the slick phrasing of a screenwriter:
… a shadow that gave off a disturbing susurrus like the maddening sibilance settling dust must make to the ears of ants. … her lips were lovely, the color of cold meat. … I’m all bottomed out. I’m down here with the basal ganglia and the halibuts.
To show yourself or your characters to the reader, be the words. When you’ve gotten the diction right, you can look at your story and say, “That’s the only way it could have been spoken.” Or you might say, “Most felicitous.” Or, “Can’t word-up no better.” It just depends on your diction.
English 102
Summary
Length: 500 words
Worth in Overall Grade: 20%
You will read the essay “Deciding on diction” by Arthur Plotnik located in
Course Resource List section of this course and then write a 500 word essay that
summarizes the reading.
You must submit your essay according to the guidelines below:
Submission Guidelines:
Export your essay to pdf and title it “Assignment 1. Summary.”
Format your essay in MLA style and include Word Count (at the end of your
paper).
Proofread your essay and correct any grammar and mechanics errors.
Summary Guidelines:
Write the introductory paragraph that summarizes the author’s thesis or main focus and the
elements that are used to support the thesis or main focus. Your summary must include an
opening sentence with the author’s name (spelled correctly) and the title of the piece (placed in
quotation marks), and at least one of the thesis, author’s purpose, or author’s point of view.
Your summary must include the following key elements:
Has a main idea/concept
Includes important facts and details
Is in the writer’s own words
Direct use of text from selections
should have quotation marks
Reflects underlying meaning
Includes details in logical order
