10.01 - Diction Practice

At the beginning of class today, I returned the diction quizzes that people took last week. On this quiz, a number of people struggled with having focused discussions on the author's choice of diction. Many people were able to accurately identify tone in the passage provided on part three of the quiz, but then cited full sentences to discuss how tone was established instead of individual words.

Today's warm up activity was to look at the feedback given on this part of the quiz and then come up with a more focused answer. These responses were recorded in people's writing journals. After everyone had a chance to do this revision, we discussed the responses that people had generated. 

Next, we continued this focus on tone and diction with a series of exercises that focused on specific uses of tone (see handouts below). Everyone completed each section individually and then we would come together as a class and people would share their responses and we discussed what it was that made answers effective and what points to be aware of in responding.

Some sample responses from class today included:

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In the "subjective" number 5 above, we talked about how this tone is actually more objective since "arrested" and "citizen" are rather generic terms. A more subjective pairing of words could be "harassed" and "hooligan" since both of those terms involve some judgement on the action and person.

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Click Image to Enlarge

We did not finish this sheet in class so everyone should look at finishing the final section of the objective and subjective tones section.

Handouts:

Using Diction to Affect Tone exercises

Homework:

Finish the final section of the formal and informal tone section and the emotional tone sheet that are part of the "Using Diction to Affect Tone" activity.

Prepare for the set three roots and prefixes quiz on Friday.