How to use language for effect

Language choice is key when creating mood, atmosphere and tone. Writers use different techniques depending on the effect they want to achieve. The sounds of words, the images they create, the literal meaning of words as well as the ideas suggested by or associated with certain words and phrases all count.

The language choices you make when writing can influence the way a reader responds to your stories. Likewise, as a reader it's important to consider choices writers make and the specific effects that these create.

Language choices help to create a sense of mood and atmosphere. Mood is the target emotion – how you want the reader to feel. Atmosphere creates and maintains that emotion through language, imagery, and specific detail. Mood and atmosphere is most clearly shown in the choice of setting (place and time).

For example, in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she describes a storm:

About midnight, while we still sat up, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof, and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of stones and soot into the kitchen-fire.

Here, Brontë has selected verbs such as ‘rattling’, ‘split’ and ‘fell’ to suggest the intensity of the storm. Adjectives such as ‘violent’ reinforce this idea.

Repeating the sounds in ‘rattling’ and ‘clatter’ - the consonance of the double tt - gives an onomatopoeic quality to the description alongside the destructive movement. We can hear the sound of ‘rattling’ and ‘clatter’ in the words themselves.

The use of these word types and sounds push the narrative in a specific way. As a writer you need to consider all these ideas when planning your writing.

Tone is the way an author shows their own or their character's feelings about something. For example, they might use a humorous, angry or sarcastic tone. In the opening to The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge creates a bleak, fearful tone – the choice of words channel the feelings of the character, Faith:

The boat moved with a nauseous, relentless rhythm, like someone chewing on a rotten tooth. The islands just visible through the mist also looked like teeth, Faith decided.

Hardinge uses two similes to create a disturbing comparison between a) the motion of the boat and the action of biting and b) the islands and teeth. It seems as if Faith is actually being chewed up inside a rotten mouth and hints that her destination might be a dangerous place.

Hardinge has also used words with lots of ‘s’ sounds that reflects the whooshing sound of the sea around Faith, but also helps to generate a sinister feeling. This repetition of the ‘s’ sound is called sibilance.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator decides to commit murder:

When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!

The narrator uses a metaphor to describe the man’s eye as a ‘vulture eye’. Since vultures are birds that eat dead things, this comparison is effective in helping the reader understand the narrator’s horror. This description along with the phrases ‘cold feeling’ and ‘blood became cold’ create a tone of disgust and fear about the eye and the old man.

Similes and metaphors

As the examples above show, similes and metaphors are useful ways to make writing more exciting and memorable whilst also helping readers to understand and imagine what is happening.

Find out more about using literary devices.

Writers choose the point of view from which the story they are writing is told. Sometimes stories have an obvious narrator (the person telling the story) and sometimes the reader doesn’t notice a narrator at all. Writers might choose to have stories narrated from one character’s point of view or from multiple points of view. Writers often create a distinctive 'voice' for the character who is telling the story – the reader 'hears' this voice in the writing.

To create a convincing narrative voice a writer will think about how their language choices reveal information about the narrator including their personality and beliefs. For example, do the word choices or sentence structures suggest they are young or old, polite or rude, a historical character or something else?

For example, in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, the narrator Pip is looking back on his childhood. It is written in the first-person, using ‘I’.

My sister, Mrs Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ‘by hand.’ Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

The narrator’s voice is clearly from a historical time period (the novel was written in 1861) and we recognise this in the long sentences and old-fashioned language. The voice sounds adult, intelligent and humorous (pointing out the fact his sister’s boasting about having brought him up ‘by hand’ could also refer to how she hit him.).

Now read this narrative voice from Laurie Halse Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory:

It started in detention. No surprise there, right?

Here, the voice sounds like a modern teenager talking directly to the reader (‘right?’). They sound sarcastic and angry (‘idiots’), using bitter humour (‘cats in the dishwasher’).

The sound of words in a sentence is another tool that writers use to create mood or atmosphere. They might use alliteration, sibilance, assonance or onomatopoeia.

For example, a 'whistling wind' uses both onomatopoeia ('whistling') and alliteration (the 'w' sound is at the start of both words). This helps the reader hear the sound of the wind.

These techniques can also help emphasise key words or link words and ideas together.

For example, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Hyde is hated on sight by many characters. He is described as:

…something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked and yet I scarce know why.

The alliteration uses the 'd' sound to emphasise all the negative adjectives. The sibilance also underlines the way Hyde is seen as unpleasant and sinister. Notice sibilance can be at the beginning, middle or end of words.

Vocabulary is the words we know and use. The best way to expand your vocabulary is by reading and picking up new words from other writers. Using more sophisticated vocabulary and expanding our vocabulary can make our writing more powerful and memorable. It can also make our writing more accurate and precise if we know the exact word for what we want to describe.

It is worth replacing over-used words and phrases, like 'bad', 'a lot' and 'said' with more precise words. 'Bad' for example could mean many things. As a writer you need to make it clear to the reader what you mean: does 'bad' in fact mean evil, dangerous or even rotten?

Let’s try describing a storm. We might start with: "The sky was lit up by lightning". We could add more precise and descriptive vocabulary: "The pitch-black sky was lit up by forked lightning." Perhaps we could use a more active verb: "The forked lightning flashed." and make the lightning seem alive: "The forked lightning flashed, ripping open the brooding pitch-black sky with its blinding claws."

As a writer it is up to you to make your writing as gripping as possible and vocabulary is a key tool to do this.

In this extract, also from A Christmas Carol, Dickens describes his main character Ebenezer Scrooge. Can you spot the language techniques and associations used here?

What do they tell us about Scrooge?

Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping,scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.