post 3

• How does the author’s diction create the tone and mood of the short story? In your explanation, include the denotative and connotative meanings of words chosen by the author.

The author's diction creates the tone and mood of the story by using exclamation marks, and exaggerating words. An example of this would be at the beginning how they thought william armstrong's (aka doodle) life was worthless because he was like a barbie doll, he couldn't do anything, but then whenever the older brother walked past him one day and saw doodle smile at him so at that point he was excited and the reason you could tell this was his mood because in the story he ran to his mom fastly and said "mama, he smiled. He's all there, he's all there!" and when someone reads that it senses a tone of amazement. The mood and tone changed at the end of the story because doodle dies, and the older brother became very upset and depressed, I could tell this was the emotion because the story used the words cried, and weep, also it again uses exclamation marks but I could tell it wasn't used for good things because it explained how everything went blurry and he layed there crying so it gives you a sense that something very bad happened. Some denotative words that were in the short story were the terms: serene, sullenly, reiterated, etc. The reason these are denotative is because they are exact words and have exact definitions. Some connotations could be terms used like: weep, brilliantly, sharply, scream, etc. The reason I would consider these connotative is because they create a more suspense or feeling to the story, they do have dictionary meanings, but these words are more exaggerated, they create more feeling to the story and what they are used for.