How Diction Leads to Tone

Just as when you use your tone of voice and gestures to communicate your attitude, or artists or photographers use light and framing to communicate their attitude, writers have particular ways to communicate their tone. One way is through their language choices, especially their choice of words, which is called diction. To fully understand the term diction, we have to recognize the differences between connotation and denotation. Denotation is the literal meaning of a word, free from any emotional or cultural associations. Connotation, on the other hand, is the emotional or cultural associations that a word carries. Every word has a denotation, but most words also have additional connotations as well. An easy example is to think about the word acquaintance. The denotation is simply “a person known informally,” but think about the connotation of that word. It clearly implies distance and a lack of an emotional connection. Imagine how you would feel if a good friend of yours introduced you to someone as an “acquaintance.” That’s the power of connotation.

ACTIVITY

Identify and explain the difference between the denotations and connotations of the following pairs of words. What are possible tones that could be created through the choice of one word over the other, depending on the subject?

  1. Inexpensive/cheap

  2. Cozy/cramped

  3. Pushy/assertive

  4. Scheme/plan

  5. Father/dad

  6. Clever/shrewd

  7. Government/regime

  8. Vagrant/homeless

Let’s take a look at how specific words create tone, this time in the context of a poem: “Happy Family” by Jane Shore. The title refers to a Chinese American stir-fry with various meats and vegetables. We’ve bolded some words that we find interesting in terms of tone, but feel free to point out some words that you find compelling.

Page 946

Tonight, the waiter brings Happy Family

steaming under a metal dome

and three small igloos of rice.

Mounded on the white oval plate, the unlikely

marriage of meat and fish, crab and chicken.

Not all Happy Families are alike.

The chef’s tossed in wilted greens

and water chestnuts, silk against crunch;

[. . .]

My daughter impales a chunk of beef

on her chopstick and contentedly

sucks on it, like a popsicle.

Eating Happy Family, we all begin to smile.

Notice how many of the words have connotations of conflict—“unlikely marriage,” “tossed,” “against,” “impales”—and yet toward the end of the section, there are words with positive connotations of warm contentment—“contentedly” and “smile.” It’s a good reminder that tone in a piece is not necessarily the same throughout. It can shift. Here the tone shifts from a tone of restrained conflict to one of dissolving tension and even contentment in just a few lines. Tone shifts often reveal a lot about the meaning of the work, so it’s important to pay close attention to an author’s diction and try to pick up on shifts of this sort.

ACTIVITY

In this excerpt from “Transhumanism” (p. 928), author Francis Fukuyama expresses his dislike for the transhumanist movement, which seeks to improve humanity by integrating itself fully with technology, with humans eventually becoming “cyborg humans.” Look carefully at Fukuyama’s diction and identify what tone he takes toward the movement to express his displeasure with its proponents. Then, go back through the excerpt and try to change the tone Fukuyama takes by changing three or four of the words he uses.

For the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As “transhumanists” see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution’s blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species.

It is tempting to dismiss transhumanists as some sort of odd cult, nothing more than science fiction taken too seriously: Witness their over-the-top Web sites and recent press releases (“Cyborg Thinkers to Address Humanity’s Future,” proclaims one). The plans of some transhumanists to freeze themselves cryogenically in hopes of being revived in a future age seem only to confirm the movement’s place on the intellectual fringe.

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