Explain what is meant by "her accurate rendering of folk idiom and her use of the oral story telling tradition" in Walker's The Color Purple.In the...

It's helpful to have an idea of the definitions of "folk
idiom" and "oral storytelling tradition."  Folk idioms are words, phrases, and figures
of speech that are common a group of people.  This language is bound by culture, place,
and time.  The tradition of oral story telling has its roots in ancient cultures when
history was passed from generation to generation through a storyteller.  In many African
cultures, the griot was the oral historian who passed on
stories.

In The Color Purple, the mode
of narration employed by Alice Walker calls on both folk idioms and oral story telling. 
Celie is the primary narrator in the novel, and in her epistles, Celie uses slang (here,
folk idioms) to express her inner thoughts and feelings to God (and later to her sister
Nettie).  Celie's informal language is common to her area and she uses figures of speech
and phrases that are readily understood by others around her, but not so easily
understood by those outside the community.  Also, the form of the novel is structured by
a series of epistles, and these function to voice the story of the characters in the
same way that an oral story would.  Although Celie addresses her letters to God, she is
really speaking directly to the reader thus maintaining a similar type of communication
that would be created through oral narration.