Bingo of the Close Reading Variety

1. "His clam, but intense attention to detail leaves readers intimidated yet expectant for the forth coming of his next step."


Rule 4 - Don't refer to the reader(s). Btw, "clam" is spelled "claim." Derp.


2. "The sound and vulgarity shows Holden's ruthless and loud personality."


Rule 6 - Avoid the word "show."


3. "Baker uses a lot of language that magnifies the importance of the coldness felt, "spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails", this creates imagery for the reader of what the daily worker sees."


Rule 8 - Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.


4. "His negative connotation is straightforward and precise."


Rule 3 - You never explained why the connotation is precise, and only ever implied straightforwardness in a very discreet way.



This is my favorite close reading:

Practice Diction Analysis

In this excerpt from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the narrator’s conversational, slightly harsh diction emphasizes the youthful, rambling, aloof style with which he speaks and thinks. The narrator rejects talking about his childhood, labeling it as “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” He furthermore isn’t going to “tell you [his] whole goddam autobiography or anything.” Rather, the narrator centers his attentions on his brother, a rich writer whom he admires, in addition to “this madman stuff that happened to [him] around last Christmas.” From the narrator’s colloquialisms and lack of consideration for conventionality when first telling someone about himself, one can derive that the narrator is a brash youth given to roughness of speech.

Style Mapping

The diction in Neil Gaiman's Stardust is rather nondescript in terms of elevation. The diction here tends to be connotative, using the same words quoted above to establish a mood of foreignness and foreboding. The sound here is more harsh than mellifluous, with phrases such as "dark slate roofs and high chimneys" and "grey and tall and stocky" which serve to evoke a feeling of strangeness which one feels when placed into an unfamiliar situation.

The diction in Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is incredibly formal, as evidenced in the following sentence: "Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task." While the previous passage was more connotative than denotative, the tone of this passage is denotative, which goes along with its genre, self-help. The sound here is sophisticated, so one might call it musical.

Finally, the diction in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is denotative, the sound noncommital, and the elevation more formal than informal. The author uses fancy adjectives to describe his surroundings, while denotative-ness can be derived from the informative tone with which he explains what he is doing. The sound, going along with the fancy adjectives used to describe, is more harmonious than discordant.