Diction Detail Imagery Syntax Tone

1. The Writer's Voice adapted from Voice Lessons by Nancy Dean Diction Detail Imagery Syntax Tone

2. Writer’s Voice Defined • Voice, the color and texture of communication, stamps expression with the indelible mark of personality. • It expresses who we are: the fingerprint of a person’s language.

3. Elements of Voice • Diction-(word choice) the foundation of voice; contributes to all of its elements. • Detail-(facts, observations, and incidents) used to develop a topic, shaping and seasoning voice. • Imagery-(verbal representation of sense experience) brings the immediacy of sensory experience to writing and gives voice a distinctive quality.

4. Elements of Voice (cont.) • Syntax-(grammatical sentence structure) controls verbal pacing and focus. • Tone-(expression of attitude) gives voice its distinctive personality

5. Diction: Words • Create color and texture of written work • Reflect and determine level of formality • Shape the reader’s perception

6. What is a “writer’s voice”? • You learn at a very young age to interpret not only what your parents say but more importantly what they don’t say. • A writer doesn’t have the advantage of verbal and facial cues to interpret hidden meanings. • A writer’s voice helps them communicate intended meanings without “verbal cues”.

7. Example • “His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

8. Diction • Choosing clear, concrete, and exact words helps shape voice. • Good writer’s avoid words like pretty, nice, and bad. • Instead they choose words that invoke a specific effect: A coat isn’t torn; it is tattered. The United States Army does not want revenge; it is thirsting for revenge. A door does not shut; it thuds. • Specific diction brings the reader into the scene, enabling full participation in the writer’s world.

9. Example • Word choice- “…My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together.” Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

10. Example • Word choice- “Alice seemed to find nothing unusual in our embrace; she walked – almost danced, her movements were so graceful – to the center of the room, where she folded herself sinuously onto the floor.” Stephenie Meyer Twilight

11. Diction • Diction depends on topic, purpose, and occasion. • The topic often determines the specificity and sophistication of diction • For example, articles on computers are filled with specialized language: e-mail, e-shopping, web, interface • Many topics generate special vocabularies as a link to meaning.

12. Diction • When choosing your words, you must consider both connotation (the meaning suggested by a word) and denotation (literal meaning). • Calling a character slender evokes a different feeling from calling the character gaunt.

13. Diction • Finally, diction can impart freshness and originality to writing. • Words used in surprising or unusual ways make us rethink what is known and re-examine meaning. • Good writers opt for complexity rather than simplicity, for multiple meanings rather than precision. • Diction, the foundation of voice, shapes a reader’s thinking while guiding reader insight into the author’s expression of thought.

14. Detail: facts, observations, and incidents • Detail brings life and color to description, focusing the reader’s attention and bringing the reader into the scene. • Detail encourages the reader to participate in the text. • Use of detail influences the reader’s views of the topic, the setting, the narrator, and the author.

15. Example • Description- “Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the plain. In July the inland slope of the Rockies is luxuriant with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur.”-N. Scott Momaday “The Way to Rainy Mountain”

16. Example • “The team works on me until late afternoon, turning my skin to glowing satin, stenciling patterns on my arms, painting flame designs on my twenty perfect nails…They erase my face with a layer of pale makeup and draw my features back out…” Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

17. Detail • Details make an abstraction concrete, particular, and unmistakable, giving the abstraction form. • Detail focuses description and prepares readers to join the action.

18. Detail • Good writers choose detail with care, selecting those details which add meaning and avoiding those that trivialize or detract.

19. Imagery-sensory experience • In literature, all five senses may be represented

20. Imagery • Visual imagery is most common, but good writers experiment with a variety of images and even purposefully intermingle the senses (giving smells a color, for example) [“Lilacs have a purple smell. Lilac is the smell of nightfall, I think.” John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible] • Imagery depends on both diction and detail: an image’s success in producing a sensory experience results from the specificity of the author’s diction and choice of detail. • Imagery contributes to voice by evoking vivid experience, conveying specific emotion, and suggesting a particular idea.

21. Imagery • Imagery itself isn’t figurative, but may be used to impart figurative or symbolic meaning. • The parched earth can be a metaphor for a character’s despair, or a bird’s flight a metaphor for hope.

22. Example • “With one lunge, I shoot as flat as a fish over the ground; there it whistles again, quickly I crouch together, claw for cover, feel something on the left, shove in beside it, it gives way, I groan, the earth leaps, the blast thunders in my ears, I creep under the yielding thing, cover myself with it, draw it over me, it is wood, cloth, cover, cover, miserable cover against the whizzing splinters.” Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front

23. Example • His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids are shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.” Stephenie Meyer Twilight

24. Imagery • Traditional imagery typically has a history. • A river, for example, is usually associated with life’s journey.

25. Syntax: word arrangement • How writers control and manipulate the sentence is a strong determiner of voice and gives personality to the writing. • Syntax encompasses word order, sentence length, sentence focus, and punctuation.

26. Syntax • Deviating from the expected word order can serve to startle the reader and draw attention to the sentence. • Try these changes to normal order: inverting subject and verb (Am I ever sorry!) placing a complement at the beginning of a sentence (Hungry, without a doubt, he is) placing an object in front of a verb (Sara I like - not Susan). • Good writers shift between conformity and nonconformity to avoid reader complacency.

27. Syntax • Varying sentence length forestalls reader boredom and controls emphasis. • A short sentence following a much longer sentence shifts the reader’s attention, which emphasizes the meaning and importance of the short sentence.

28. Syntax • Punctuation also reinforces meaning and adds variety. • The semicolon gives equal weight to two or more independent clauses. It gives balance and emphasizes equal value to both parts of the sentence. • The colon directs reader attention to the words that follow. A colon, sets the expectation that important, closely related information will follow. • The dash marks a sudden change in thought or tone, sets off a brief summary. The dash often conveys a casual tone.

29. Example • Parallel structure- “There are the green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel.” N. Scott Momaday The Way to Rainy Mountain

30. “A mass of wet grass, marchedupon, rustled like silk.” Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage Participial phrase used to interrupt the subject and verb which deviates from expected word order Example

31. Tone: attitude • The writer creates tone by selection (diction) and arrangement (syntax) of words, and by purposeful use of details and images. • Tone sets the relationship between reader and writer. • As emotion growing out of the material and connecting the material to the reader, tone reveals the writer’s personality.

32. Example • “My grandmother was spared the humiliation of those high gray walls…but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.”-N. Scott Momaday The Way to Rainy Mountain