Diction
Detail
Imagery
Syntax
Tone
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.
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.
Elements of Voice (cont.)
Syntax-(grammatical sentence structure) controls verbal pacing and focus.
Tone-(expression of attitude) gives voice its distinctive personality
Diction: Words
Create color and texture of written work
Reflect and determine level of formality
Shape the reader’s perception
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".
Example
Cues- "The old stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is well known, he always does with buried treasure; particularly when it has been ill gotten." Washington Irving "The Devil and Tom Walker"
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.
Example
Word choice- "…he met a black man one evening in his usual woodman’s dress, with his ax on his shoulder, sauntering along the swamp, and humming a tune." Washington Irving "The Devil and Tom Walker"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Example
Description- "The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high…partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud…" Washington Irving "The Devil and Tom Walker"
Example
"We walked up the massive staircase, my hand trailing along the satin-smooth rail. The long hall at the top of the stairs was paneled with a honey-colored wood, the same as the floorboards." Stephenie Meyer Twilight
Detail
Details make an abstraction concrete, particular, and unmistakable, giving the abstraction form.
Detail focuses description and prepares readers to join the action.
Detail
Good writers choose detail with care, selecting those details which add meaning and avoiding those that trivialize or detract.
Imagery-sensory experience
In literature, all five senses may be represented
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.
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.
Example
Metaphor- "It was announced in the papers with the usual flourish, that a great man had fallen in Israel." Washington Irving "The Devil and Tom Walker"
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
Imagery
Traditional imagery typically has a history.
A river, for example, is usually associated with life’s journey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Example
Punctuation- "The needy and adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land jobber, the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit,-in short, everyone driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices hurried to Tom Walker." Washington Irving "The Devil and Tom Walker
Example
The vampire who wanted to be good – who ran around saving people’s lives so he wouldn’t be a monster…I stared toward the front of the room." Stephenie Meyer Twilight
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.
Example
"Such according to this most authentic old story, was all that was to be found of Tom’s wife." Washington Irving "The Devil and Tom Walker"
