Diction Analysis Passages

Directions: Choose ONE of the following passages for diction analysis. Copy and annotate that passage into your composition notebook. Using your annotation, write an analysis of the author’s diction.

The Scarlet Letter

Selection #1

“Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite. Then flinging the already written pages of the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy” (184).

Selection #2

“Once, this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly, --for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions, --she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had know full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice, in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion” (Ch. 6).

The Color of Water

Selection #1

In the summer she was the Pied Piper, leading the whole pack of us to public swimming pools, stripping down to her one-piece bathing suit and plunging into the water like a walrus, the rest of us following her like seals, splashing and gurgling in terror behind her as Mommy flailed along, seemingly barely able to swim herself until one of us coughed and sputtered, at which time she whipped through the water and grabbed the offending child, pulling him out and slapping him on the back, laughing. We did not consider ourselves poor or deprived or depressed, for the rules of the outside world seemed meaningless to us as children. But as we grew up and fanned out into the world as teenagers and college students, we brought the outside world home with us, and the world that Mommy had so painstakingly created began to fall apart” (95).

Selection # 2

“Rev. Owens’s sermons started like a tiny choo-choo train and endedup like a roaring locomotive. He’d begin in a slow drawl, then get warmed up and jerk back and forth over the subject matter like a stutterer gone wild: ‘We… [silence]…know…today…arrhh…um…I said WEEEE…know…THAT [silence]ahhh…JESUS[church: ‘Amen!’]…ahhh, CAME DOWN…[‘Yes! Amen!’] I said CAME DOWWWWNNNN! [‘Go on!’] He CAME-ON-DOWN-AND-LED- THE-PEOPLE-OF-JERU-SALEM-AMEN!’ Then he’d shift to a babbling “Amen” mode, where he spoke in fast motion and the words popped out of his mouth like artillery rounds. “Amens” fired across the room like bullets. ‘It’s so good AMEN to know God AMEN and I tell you AMEN that if you AMEN only come AMEN to God yourself AMEN there will be AMEN no turning back AMEN AMEN AMEN! Can I get an AMEN?’ (‘AMEN!’)” (47).