Choosing the Right Diction for Your Manuscript

While trying to incorporate creative strategies and great sentence structures into your manuscript, it is important to choose the right diction so your intentions do not get completely alienated from your writing.  Below are steps to help you choose the right diction for your manuscript:

Determine the purpose of your writing:

To choose the right diction for your manuscript, you should determine the purpose you want it to serve. For instance, fictional writers may employ the use of flowery diction and are often times more conversational, unlike non-fictional writers who use formal and straightforward diction with a little complexity in the sentence structure. That way, you can rest assured your purpose of writing matches the tone of your manuscript.

Use diction to establish literary elements:

You choice of words should appropriately suit the literary element of your manuscript especially when you are writing a fictional book.

For instance, a Nigerian book featuring two different settings such as urban and rural should also employ different diction for the characters.

Also, your diction should reflect your characters demography, especially age and occupation. Characters whose designations are geologists or other science-related fields should be able to use more technical and pedantic terms than others who are not.

The choice of words for each character should also adequately reflect their age. While young characters might exhibit their youthful exuberance through the use of slangs and colloquialism, the elderly characters might employ proverbs in their diction. An example is how Chinua Achebe’s older characters use a lot of proverbs.

Your diction should reflect the setting of your manuscript:

if your manuscript is about Americans for instance, then the choice of words you employ for the manuscript should be American English and not British English.

Do you find the above tips helpful on how to choose the right diction for your manuscript? Drop your thoughts in the comment box below.

Chima Rachael J.