Diction, Imagery, & Tone
Abigail Marie Mladenka Jones
Diction
Diction is the choice of words and phrases in speech and writing.
Examples:
- Close by the fire sat an old man whose countenance was furrowed with distress.
- The dimples in her cheeks emphasized her beautiful smile.
Imagery
Imagery is visually descriptive or figurative language.
Examples:
- I sat on the stump of a tree at his feet, and below us stretched the land, the great expanse of the forests, somber under the sunshine, rolling like a sea, with glints of winding rivers, the grey spots of villages, and here and there a clearing, like an islet of light amongst the dark waves of continuous tree-tops. A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous land-scape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint haze, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel.
- I slept on my bed with the ceiling above me and the window to my left. In front of me is the television, and the 2 doors from my room. To my right is the wall with the bookshelf and the closet door.
Tone
Tone is the general attitude of a piece of writing.
Examples:
- But that is Cooper's way; frequently he will explain and justify little things that do not need it and then make up for this by as frequently failing to explain important ones that do need it. For instance he allowed that astute and cautious person, Deerslayer-Hawkeye, to throw his rifle heedlessly down and leave it lying on the ground where some hostile Indians would presently be surer to find it - a rifle prized by that person above all things else in the earth - and the reader gets no word of explanation of that strange act. There was a reason, but it wouldn't bear exposure. Cooper meant to get a fine dramatic effect out of the finding of the rifle by the Indians, and he accomplished this at the happy time; but all the same, Hawkeye could have hidden the rifle in a quarter mile of a minute where the Indian could not have found it. cooper couldn't think of anyway to explain why hawkeye didn't do that, so he just shirked the difficulty and did not explain at all.
- The movie was awful, it had no plot. There was no development of characters and they were not cast well. The movie was not filmed well.