What "diction" means in literature

A term you'll meet in literary style.

Diction is the writer's choice of words — and, by extension, the cumulative effect that choice produces in the reader. Every word a writer picks excludes a thousand others; the specific selection creates the texture, the register, and the tone of the prose. Diction is to writing what brushwork is to painting: the granular, sentence-level surface that carries almost everything the larger work is doing.

The basic axes

Critics talk about diction along several axes:

Formal vs. informal. "He passed away" is formal; "he kicked the bucket" is informal. Same fact, different register.
Abstract vs. concrete. "Justice" is abstract; "a man returning a wallet to its owner" is concrete. Strong writers usually choose concrete diction where they can.
Latinate vs. Anglo-Saxon. English has a double vocabulary — the Anglo-Saxon core (short, plain, direct: house, dog, eat) and the Latinate overlay (longer, more abstract: residence, canine, consume). The choice between them shapes tone enormously.
Plain vs. ornate. Hemingway is plain; Henry James is ornate. Neither is better; both are choices.
Standard vs. dialectal. Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Kelman in How Late It Was, How Late — each insists on a vernacular diction the reader must learn.
Specialized vs. general. Medical, legal, military, ecclesiastical — each profession has its own diction, and writers who borrow from one are usually doing so deliberately.

Diction at the sentence level

Two writers describing the same scene:

The old man walked slowly back to the boat. He was very tired.

Hemingway. Plain, Anglo-Saxon, mostly monosyllabic. The diction does almost no decorative work; the sentences want to disappear into the action.

The aged mariner traversed the strand with deliberate care, his limbs registering the accumulated fatigue of an unforgiving afternoon.

A parody of late-Victorian style. Latinate, polysyllabic, formal. The same event; a completely different reading experience. Notice that this prose does decorative work, and the work is now visible — which may be exactly what a particular piece of writing wants.

Diction and tone

Diction is the primary engine of tone. The same fact described in different diction produces different attitudes. A "lone hunter" is heroic; an "isolated assailant" is clinical; a "guy with a gun" is journalistic. Writers signal their stance through word choice before they make any explicit argument.

The reader's job: hearing the choice

Most diction is invisible to most readers most of the time — which is why diction is so powerful. The way a sentence is worded shapes how you feel about its content before you have a chance to evaluate the content. Skilled readers train themselves to notice the choice — to ask, "Why this word and not its synonym?" Once you start hearing it, the question doesn't shut off. (This is, incidentally, the question Lexio is built to answer.)

How to read it in context

When a passage's effect is hard to name, look at the verbs, the adjectives, and the level of abstraction. The diction catalogue you build sentence by sentence will tell you what tone the writer is going for, what register the work inhabits, and what kind of reader it is asking you to be.

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