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Diction In Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

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Truman Capote, author of the nonfiction novel In Cold blood, depicts the tragic event of a murder leaving a prominent community family dead. By Capote’s choice of diction he is able to illustrate the characters through the strategies irony and create a nervous tone to develop Dick and Perry as characters instead of stereotypical murderers.
The passage opens with Capote describing the killers, Dick and Perry. Capote’s choice of words to describe them provides his readers with a physical image and a chance to form an opinion about them. For example he writes that both, “were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails”(30). In other words, the killers are calculated in their actions and show that they contradict


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