From thoughtco.com
In composition, tone is the expression of a writer’s attitude toward subject, audience, and self.
Tone is primarily conveyed in writing through diction, point of view, syntax, and level of formality.
Etymology: From the Latin, “string, a stretching”
“In Writing: A Manual for the Digital Age,” David Blakesley and Jeffrey L. Hoogeveen make a simple distinction between style and tone: “Style refers to the overall flavor and texture created by the writer’s word choices and sentence structures. Tone is an attitude toward the events of the story—humorous, ironic, cynical, and so on.” In practice, there’s a close connection between style and tone.
Tone and Persona
In Thomas S. Kane’s “The New Oxford Guide to Writing,” “If persona is the complex personality implicit in the writing, tone is a web of feelings stretched throughout an essay, feelings from which our sense of the persona emerges. Tone has three main strands: the writer’s attitude toward subject, reader, and self.
https://www.thoughtco.com/tone-writing-definition-1692183
From wheaton.edu
Tone
Aside from individual word choice, the overall tone, or attitude, of a piece of writing should be appropriate to the audience and purpose. The tone may be objective or subjective, logical or emotional, intimate or distant, serious or humorous. It can consist mostly of long, intricate sentences, of short, simple ones, or of something in between. (Good writers frequently vary the length of their sentences.)
One way to achieve proper tone is to imagine a situation in which to say the words being written. A journal might be like a conversation with a close friend where there is the freedom to use slang or other casual forms of speech. A column for a newspaper may be more like a high-school graduation speech: it can be more formal, but it can still be funny or familiar. An academic paper is like a formal speech at a conference: being interesting is desirable, but there is no room for personal digressions or familiar usage of slang words.
In all of these cases, there is some freedom of self-expression while adapting to the audience. In the same way, writing should change to suit the occasion.
Tone vs. Voice
Anything you write should still have your voice: something that makes your writing sound uniquely like you. A personal conversation with a friend differs from a speech given to a large group of strangers. Just as you speak to different people in different ways yet remain yourself, so the tone of your writing can vary with the situation while the voice — the essential, individual thoughts and expression — is still your own.
Examples:
“Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.”
– Miles Davis“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.”
– Artur Schnabel (1882–1951), German-born U.S. pianist.
These two musicians expressed the same thought in their own unique voices.
From writerswrite.co.za
How do you find the correct tone?
You can usually find a tone by asking these three questions:
- Why am I writing this?
- Who is my intended audience?
- What do I want the reader to learn, understand, or think about?
https://writerswrite.co.za/155-words-to-describe-an-authors-tone/
From jerryjenkins.com
Types of Tone in Writing
The list is nearly endless—show me a human emotion, I’ll show you a tone—
but here are the basic ones:
- Formal
- Informal
- Optimistic
- Pessimistic
- Joyful
- Sad
- Sincere
- Hypocritical
- Fearful
- Hopeful
- Humorous
- Serious
While tones can vary with every character and scene, the overall tone of your story must remain consistent to keep from confusing your reader and hindering your message.
Examples of Tone in Literature
Robert Frost begins his poem The Road Not Taken with a hopeful, contemplative tone.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
By the end, he’s switched to reflection and positivity.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In The Old Man and the Sea, his final published work, Ernest Hemingway effects a tone of loneliness, sadness, defeat, and discouragement (at least on the part of the boy).
But, you can also read into what’s not said and detect a tone of courage or expectation on the part of the old man. Who continues to fish day after day when they’ve caught nothing?
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.
It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
In The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis writes this passage with a clear tone of self-pity and sadness that shifts to fear.
‘I do think,’ said Shasta, ‘that I must be the most unfortunate boy that ever lived in the whole world. Everything goes right for everyone except me…I was left behind…I was the one who was sent on…I got left out.’ And being very tired and having nothing inside him, he felt so sorry for himself that the tears rolled down his cheeks.
What put a stop to all this was a sudden fright. Shasta discovered that someone or somebody was walking beside him. It was pitch dark and he could hardly hear any footfalls. What he could hear was breathing. His invisible companion seemed to breathe on a very large scale, and Shasta got the impression that it was a very large creature. And he had come to notice this breathing so gradually that he had really no idea how long it had been there. It was a horrible shock.
https://jerryjenkins.com/tone-in-writing/
From literarydevices.net
Consider the following examples of tone:
- “I want to ask the authorities what is the big deal? Why do they not control the epidemic? It is eating up lives like a monster.”
- “I want to draw the attention of the appropriate authorities toward damage caused by the epidemic. If steps are not taken to curb it, it will further injure our community.”
The theme of both tone examples is the same. The only way we can differentiate between them is their separate tone. The tone in the first example is casual or informal while, it is more formal in the second.
Tone Examples in Common Speech
We adopt a variety of tones in our day-to-day speech. This intonation of our speech determines what message we desire to convey. Read a few examples below:
Example #1
Father: “We are going on a vacation.”
Son: “That’s great!!!”
– The tone of son’s response is very cheerful.
Example #2
Father: “We can’t go on vacation this summer.”
Son: “Yeah, great! That’s what I expected.”
– The son’s tone is sarcastic.
Example #3
“Yeah, your grades on this exam will be as good as the previous exams.”
– The tone is pessimistic in this example.
Example #4
“Can someone tell me what the hell is going on here?”
– This has an aggressive tone.
Short Examples of Tone
- Though the starry sky was beautiful, his mood was so melancholic that he took no interest in it.
- The old man took the handful of dust from his farm and sniffed it with great pleasure.
- The sweet smell of spring roses made overjoyed him.
- The old man’s face looked so peaceful after death that he seemed in deep sleep.
- The spectacle of sunset was so astounding that people stood watching breathlessly.
- The scorching heat of the desert sun burned his skin black, and he could see death hovering over his head.
- The singing of birds was deemed a messenger for approaching spring.
- His stinking breath kept listeners at a considerable distance from him.
- The muffled church bell sounded as thought it came from an unfathomably deep well.
- The kind touch of her mother’s hand comforted her in her pain.
- He was on his way to home when he saw a boy of ten, who moved his heart as he stood weeping.
- The negotiations between the two states came to a halt after terms of reference could not be agreed upon.
- The harsh gusts of cruel cold wind battered her body.
- He went into the restaurant and ordered a hot coffee, the cozy atmosphere inside reminded him of the past.
Examples of Tone in Literature
Tone has a significant place in literature as it manifests writers’ attitudes toward different subjects.
Example #1: Catcher in the Rye (By J. D. Salinger)
Holden Caulfield, in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, unfolds his personality through the tone he adopts throughout the novel. Let us have a look at some of his remarks:
- “All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
- “If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”
- “Goddamn money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”
- “Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re Catholic.”
Holden’s tone is bitterly sarcastic as he criticizes the nature of things in real life. His character may reveal the attitude of the writer towards life, as it is common for writers to use their characters as their mouthpieces.
Example #2: The School (By Donald Barthelme)
Observe the tone of a short story, The School, by Donald Barthelme:
“And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.”
The use of the adjectives “dead” and “depressing” sets a gloomy tone in the passage. As trees signify life here, their unexpected “death” from an unknown cause gives the above passage an unhappy and pessimistic tone.
Example #3: The Road Not Taken (By Robert Frost)
Robert Frost, in the last stanza of his poem The Road Not Taken, gives us an insight into the effect of tone:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Frost tells us about his past with a “sigh,” this gives the above lines an unhappy tone. This tone leads us into thinking that the speaker in the poem had to make a difficult choice.
Example #4: A River Runs Through It (By Norman Maclean)
“This was the last fish we were ever to see Paul catch. My father and I talked about this moment several times later, and whatever our other feelings, we always felt it fitting that, when we saw him catch his last fish, we never saw the fish but only the artistry of the fisherman.”
The extract contains tones of loss and nostalgia; however, the characters look quite satisfied with the way things are moving forward.
Example #5: The Tell-Tale Heart (By Edgar Allen Poe)
“It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND – MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased. O God! What COULD I do?”
This short story by Poe contains the tones of insanity, nervousness, and guilt. The character suffers from all these feelings, which the writer has translated into a story.
Example #6: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (By Ernest Hemingway)
“It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.”
In this short excerpt, the culminating tone of the writer is that of peace and serenity, though he talks of the day time in a bit different tone.
Function of Tone
Tone, in a piece of literature, decides how the readers read a literary piece, and how they should feel while they are reading it. It stimulates the readers to read a piece of literature as a serious, comical, spectacular, or distressing manner. In addition, tone lends shape and life to a piece of literature because it creates a mood. Moreover, tone bestows voice to characters, and throws light on the personalities and dispositions of characters that readers understand better.
https://literarydevices.net/tone/
From writersdigest.com (read the full piece at https://www.writersdigest.com/improve-my-writing/7-ways-to-perfect-your-writing-tone)
7 Ways to Perfect Your Writing “Tone”
Often when we feel something is missing from a piece of writing, the key lies in examining the tone. Here’s how to revise your work so that it resonates.
Do you obsess about the tone of your writing as you revise? You should. Tone is one of the most overlooked elements of writing. It can create interest, or kill it.
It’s no wonder that so many of the countless conversations I’ve had with writing students and colleagues have been about problems related to tone. A friend submitting a novel says the editors “don’t like the main character.” A nonfiction book on balancing a family and a career skirts the edge of whining. An agent turns down a query because she feels “too much distance from the heart of the story.” I scan the latest work of a journalist friend who’s coming to dinner and find it meticulously sourced and well written, but grim in outlook.
And of course any publication you want to write for will have its own tone, which it would be smart for you to try to match. Notice how quietly all New Yorker profile pieces begin, while Utne Reader favors unconventional and unexpected viewpoints that challenge the status quo.
What exactly do I mean by tone? That’s a good question, as there are many terms—mood, style, voice, cadence, inflection—used to mean much the same thing. For now let’s agree that tone is the author’s attitude toward his subject: grave, amused, scientific, intimate, aggrieved, authoritative, whatever.
If you were a photographer, tone would be the way you light your subject. For dramatic shadows, lit from the side. For a scary effect, from above. For romance, lit with candles. In a movie, tone is often conveyed with music—think of the ominous score accompanying the girl swimming in shark-infested waters in Jaws.
A writer doesn’t have a soundtrack or a strobe light to build the effect she wants. She has conflict, surprise, imagery, details, the words she chooses, and the way she arranges them in sentences. Like the tone you use when you talk to somebody, tone in writing determines how a reader responds. If the piece sounds angry, he gets nervous. If it’s wry and knowing, he settles in for an enjoyable read. If it’s dull, he leaves it on the train, half read.
Thus, the wrong tone can derail an otherwise good piece.
(read the full piece at https://www.writersdigest.com/improve-my-writing/7-ways-to-perfect-your-writing-tone)
KC Storytellers 