What Is Diction: Definition & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- Aug 17
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 8
Diction determines the particular effect that a piece of writing or even a speech has on readers or listeners. So what exactly does it mean? Here is a formal definition of the term:
Diction refers to the choice and arrangement of words in a piece of writing or speech.
There are several factors that go into diction or word choice. It is influenced by:
The audience being spoken to
The intended effect of the writing or speech
The background of the writer
Diction is something that relates to poetry, prose, and speech. We have already spoken about diction in relation to poetry. You can check it out here: Poetic Diction: Definition & Examples.
We will begin with diction in the context of rhetoric or speech with an example from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”:
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.
There are a number of characteristics of this speech that are noteworthy. In the very first sentence, we see the phrase “Five score years ago.” This is a kind of Biblical allusion and is the biblical reference to the number 100. It is the kind of language that would be used in the bible.
The speech is also written in formal English and is highly poetic and rhetorical. It is written in standard English as opposed to dialect, which marks it as formal. The metaphorical language used is quite vivid. For example, “manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” There is also a lot of repetition, especially anaphora or “repetition at the beginning.”
MLK’s speech would be a good contrast to that of his contemporary, Malcolm X, another Black Civil Rights leader from the 1960s. The difference was based on the men’s desired political goals and their target audience. King was focused on positive change for Black people through peaceful means. Malcolm X, on the other hand, believed in securing rights by any means necessary, including violence.
Diction and target audience
Diction, as mentioned earlier, is determined by one’s target audience. This should be taken into account when considering the difference in style and diction between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. There are very few pictures of Malcolm X and MLK meeting with each other, and for good reason.
Their politics was vastly different from each other. MLK focused on balancing his appeal between African American and the general White American public. He believed in achieving civil rights for African Americans by appealing to a White majority electorate, who he believed could be convinced into voting for and supporting Civil Rights legislation, which would help African Americans integrate into White American society and be granted equal rights.
Malcolm X was a Garveyite and believed that Black people should organize themselves to gain more power and not necessarily care about integrating into White society. In his opinion, the goal was for Black people to gain more political power and independence through either “the ballot or the bullet.”
Because MLK did not want his White target audience to associate him with Malcolm X’s message of “by any means necessary,” he tended to avoid meeting with Malcolm. On the other hand, Malcolm X had nothing to lose meeting with King. His core audience were African Americans. His message to them was gaining power and equal rights by any means necessary.
Meeting with King would only enhance his image and popularity (or rather notoriety) among king’s wider White audience. To lean about why the non-violent King would not want to meet with X, let’s look at one of his most famous speeches, The Ballot or the Bullet (given in 1964):
1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed. The most explosive year. Why? It's also a political year. It's the year when all of the white politicians will be back in the so-called Negro community jiving you and me for some votes. The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer.
X, unlike the speech by MLK, is much less formal. He even uses colloquial language such as “jiving.” His message is obviously not non-violent. More than that, while he relies on rhetorical language such as simple repetition, he is less ornate and much more direct than King. For example, the first sentence in the passage directly expresses that 1964 promises to be explosive. This is a metaphor; however, it i sthe type of language that we expect to hear in ordinary conversations.
He then repeats it in the sentence that follows in a short sentence, which is actually a sentence fragment. Again, this has teh quality of making the speech appear to have more in common with ordinary language used in common conversation. Malcolm X also directly mocks the Christian concept of turning the other cheek or nonviolence that King relies on in the last sentence of the extract.
MLK uses the rhetorical concept of ethos (or emotional appeals) in his “I Have a Dream” speech. He appeals to White folks emotionally by linking the values of civil rights for Black people to the concept of America’s equality ideal associated with the Emancipation Proclamation. Malcolm X also appeals to ethos, but he is appealing to Black people and their collective sense of alienation from these supposed American ideals. In fact, Malcolm X is famous in that speech for the phrase "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us." Plymouth Rock refers to the dock where the first American settlers landed. X uses chiasmus here to show the gulf between the ideals or positions of White Americans with those of Black Americans.
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Diction based on the persona’s social background
Diction applies to fiction as much as it applies to rhetoric, and writers will use diction to emphasize certain aspects of a character’s personality. This means that diction can often make a huge part of a character’s or persona’s character analysis. We can see this by comparing the diction being used by personas in two different pieces of literature, namely, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (published in 1843) and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (published in 1842).
In both works, the main characters are unreliable narrators. This means that their narration or perspective cannot be trusted. Such a lack of trust stems from their insanity. In “My Last Duchess,” the persona of the poem is a wealthy and aristocratic duke speaking to an emissary helping him arrange a marriage. He needs a new wife because he killed the last one because she smiled too much at small things like the sunset instead of preserving all her affection and smiles for him.
He has made a painting of her, which he keeps behind a curtain hidden from the world unless he wishes guests to see:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
The duke has the diction of a polite aristocrat. He is talkative and conversational and sounds like the kind of host, who would be mortified at the idea of keeping their guests bored with silence. The duke is so polite that he cannot even mention that his wife is dead and simply says euphemistically that she’s “Looking as if she were alive” in the painting.
He resorts to a euphemism again when he explains why he killed her:
She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West . . .
Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.
Describing her wife as having “a heart too soon made glad” can even be described as using language in an educated and refined manner. He simply means to say that she had a generous disposition. Again, he describes his wife being killed using an understatement with the phrase “all smiles stopped together.”
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe gives another insane and unreliable narrator, who has no such refinement, and it shows in his diction. Just like the duke, this narrator has murdered someone. However, unlike the duke, he commits the murder with his own hands. His reason for murder is also far less sophisticated than the duke’s. He kills an old man because his victim has a blue eye that he becomes obsessed with:
True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
The em dashes used by Poe shows the sense of agitation the mind of the narrator is in. This is unlike the duke who remains calm and composed throughout his dramatic monologue. His sentences are longer and more conversational than that of the persona in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The speaker in Poe’s story is also begging us to be convinced that he isn’t insane. Something the duke would never stoop to do.
The speaker in Poe’s short story knows that the world sees him as mad, as he lacks the social status and class that would protect him from such an accusation to begin with. This explains why he is pleading with the audience that he isn't insane. The duke is also so polite and refined that he would never use deranged language, referring to hearing "all things in the heaven and in the earth."
He could not even bring himself to say that he killed his wife or that his wife is dead. The duke only hints at it. Our protagonist in "The Tell-Tale Heart," on the other hand, confesses and even boasts about his method of killing the old man. At one point in the story, he claims:
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
In the case of the duke, his wealth, power, and status mean that he can, to a certain extent, define or redefine social reality. If he deems it perfectly normal to kill a wife who is too impressed by the sunset, who is anybody to say otherwise? Besides, the duke has enough power to give orders to silence anyone who disagrees, as he did with his wife.
Cite this EminentEdit Article |
Antoine, M. (2025, August 17). What Is Diction: Definition & Examples | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/diction |
