What is Diction in Literature? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Raymond Malewitz
Associate Professor of American Literatures
Nov 5, 2024
Literary critics use the term “diction” to describe an author’s or narrator’s or character’s choice of words. This concept seems pretty simple [diction = word choice], but in my experience, it can be difficult for students to use the term effectively in their literature essays. Consider the following sample sentence: “F. Scott Fitzgerald uses diction to describe love in his novel The Great Gatsby.”
If we were to simply replace “diction” with its definition in this sentence, we’d see the problem: “F. Scott Fitzgerald use word choice to depict love in his novel.” Well… of course he does. He also chooses words to do everything else in the novel, too!
Given how silly this observation sounds, why do variations on this kind of sentence show up so often in high school and college essays? Well, part of the problem stems from the fact that defining diction as word choice implies that we have infinite choices in it comes to the language we use. For the vast majority of us, that really isn’t the case. For better and for worse, the words and phrases that we use in our daily lives come to us from our environments: our friends, our families, our cultures, our historical moments, our formal or informal educations, our jobs, and so on. Even though I’ve lived in Oregon for over a decade, for example, I still use the word “pop” instead of “soda” to describe this thing, because I grew up in Michigan where that term is so common that, well, it just sounds right to me. It’s a fundamental component of my diction.
If we keep this idea in mind, we might understand diction—the words we choose when we communicate—as less a choice among infinite other choices than a record of our placement in the world. Our diction, in other words, is a fundamental, idiosyncratic component of who we are.
We aren’t completely trapped by a single diction, of course. I can, if I think about it, call a pop a soda, and my diction can change based upon other contexts and circumstances as well. When I talk with my friends, I’m often choosing different words than when I’m talking with my students. And I’d adopt a far different diction at a funeral than at an OSU football game!
Storytellers perform the same kind of code-switching when they create characters and narrators who speak in their own unique style. And this is where paying attention to diction gets interesting—when one kind of diction interacts with or spills over into another.
To give you a sense of what I mean, let’s consider two passages from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby in which two different characters are talking about the same thing: love. The first is told in the language of the narrator, Nick Carraway, a sensitive, highly educated young man from an upper-class background who has traveled to New York City to make his way in the world. The second is told in the language of Jay Gatsby, Nick’s neighbor in New York. While he invents an elaborate story for his success, Gatsby is, as we discover, in fact a wealthy bootlegger from a poor family. The differences between these two characters’ backgrounds are thrown into relief by the different dictions they adopt when they are writing or speaking.
Here's the first passage, in which Nick recounts a story that Gatsby is telling him of falling in love with Daisy Buchanan—a married woman who also happens to be Nick’s cousin. As I read it, try to determine how you would describe Nick’s diction and what that diction might be telling us about Nick as well as Gatsby:
“He [that is to say, Gatsby] 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. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.”
Nick’s diction here may, perhaps, reflect Gatsby’s actual feelings for Daisy as he struggles to reconcile her actual self with the fantasy he has constructed of her—more on that in a second. But one thing this diction also clearly reflects is Nick’s intellectual disposition and background. As a graduate of Yale University—a sort of Oregon State of the East Coast—Nick translates Gatsby’s story (which we never get in Gatsby’s own words) through complex combinations of figurative language that would be out-of-character for Gatsby himself. In that first sentence alone, Nick skillfully combines a metaphor (“wed,” meaning to join together), a synecdoche (Daisy’s “perishable breath,” standing in for her mortal self) and an analogy (Gatsby’s mind “romping” like the mind of God in his fantasy of Daisy). He then calls Gatsby’s story “appallingly sentimental,” a phrase that means overly emotional, which Gatsby would, of course, also be unlikely to use. All of this linguistic complexity means that Nick’s diction could be called high or elevated. You could also call it abstract, poetic, Romantic, and maybe just a little pompous.
Nick isn’t lying here. It seems pretty clear that he believes that Gatsby thinks of his love for Daisy on these terms and in this way. But the diction here is, of course, Nick’s translation of Gatsby’s thoughts, and is therefore a marker of Nick’s particular, idiosyncratic way of thinking about the world. Indeed, he even admits to this shortcoming when he tells us that Gatsby’s story reminds him of something that he just can’t place—something beautiful and rhythmic—a “fragment of lost words” that are outside the realm of his diction.
So is Nick’s description accurate to what Gatsby is feeling? Let’s take a look at how Gatsby himself characterizes his love of Daisy without Nick’s diction getting in the way. A little later in the novel, after Gatsby’s affair with Daisy has begun, Gatsby tells Nick:
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, ‘way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”
Now, to a certain extent, Gatsby is saying the same thing as Nick here. He loves Daisy and at the same time, the budding lovers’ understanding of each other might not exactly line up with reality. But the diction is, of course, TOTALLY different from Nick’s. Gone are the florid metaphors and Latinate constructions that constitute Nick’s way of seeing the world. Instead of describing his love as a “tuning fork that had been struck upon a star,” Gatsby simply tells Nick that “I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her.” Instead of calling their love an “incarnation,” Gatsby describes the feeling more plainly as “getting deeper in love every minute.” And there is also that awkward construction “I knew different things from her,” which suggests that Gatsby’s command of the English language isn’t as strong as Nick’s.
Gatsby’s diction (as much as he tries to cover it over with phrases like “old sport”) is thus a plain or low style, and for that reason, it differs in substantial ways from Nick’s. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t love Daisy, of course, but it does suggest that his sense of love differs from Nick’s soaring, intellectual description.
So this is one reason to pay attention to diction: it enables readers to see how a given character’s word choices help us to understand their worldview and the tone they take towards a given subject (in this case, love). Differences in characters’ diction can therefore help us to see certain subtle ironies in a given story that we might not be able to see without them. It might, for example, help young readers to realize that the Gatsby they come to know in reading this great novel is actually two different people—the “Great” Gatsby that Nick creates through his diction and the actual, flesh-and-blood Jay Gatsby.
One final reason that we should pay attention to diction in literature (and in life) is that, as I mentioned earlier, people do not always adopt the same, consistent diction in their speech or have as much control over their diction as they might think they do. Gatsby struggles at times to have his diction match the occasion, but the great bungler of diction in the novel is Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband. Tom is a brutish, arrogant, misogynist racist who serves as the novel’s primary antagonist. Early in the novel, Tom tells Nick and Daisy about a book he has just read called “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” which supposedly tells the story of the coming collapse of white “civilization.” Here’s how Tom describes it:
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
I won’t go into any interpretation of this passage, other than to say that Tom’s diction could be used to create a devastatingly ironic (and pretty funny) argument against his racist worldview. Instead, I want to ask you to consider how that irony is conveyed through Tom’s choice of words. How does Tom’s diction undermine his message of supposed superiority here? If you have any thoughts as to how this reading might proceed, I hope you’ll share them with me in the comments section below. Happy reading everybody!
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Malewitz, Raymond. "What is Diction in Literature?" Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-diction-literature-definition-examples. Accessed [insert date].