HyperGrammar2
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Diction
Diction is simply your choice of words. There is no single, correct diction in the English language; rather, different words or phrases are used in different contexts, as in the following example:
- To an employer
- an oversight
- To the police
- an accident
- To a child
- a mistake
- To a friend
- a screw-up
All of these words mean the same thing—that is, they have the same denotation—but you would not use them interchangeably: a police officer or employer would interpret screw-up as an insult, while your friends at the bar after a hockey game would think oversight is pretentious.
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© Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa, 2024
