Most of the language we are exposed to is in medium diction. Essays, newspaper articles, textbooks, and most public speeches are medium diction. In order to make a thematic point or to create a sense of dialect, some literature is in low diction. And yes, that means that vulgarity, obscenity, and the like are beneath low diction. Kind of makes you think.
Tone is at once the trickiest and the most revealing aspect of anyone s language.
One helpful way to identify the tone of a piece is to ask yourself what mood the speaker seems to be in. Studying word choice and phrasing is a good way to investigate the tone of a work. Voice is a grammatical term that concerns the origin of action in a sentence. There are two voices, active and passive. The passive voice should be used sparingly, for deliberate reasons.