Describing Tone

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Tone can be a tricky thing to discuss. Writers can convey the whole range of human emotion, so unless you expand your vocabulary a bit, you might find that your description of the tone doesn’t quite capture what you’re seeing and hearing in the piece. Your goal should be to move beyond simple concepts like “happy” and “sad,” “positive” and “negative.” Life is usually not that simple, and neither is tone.

ACTIVITY

Look over the following words that can be used to describe the tone or attitude of a speaker or author toward a topic and try to place them on a continuum such as the one shown below, knowing that many are going fall into the spaces between. Then, return to some of the texts (or the photograph) you looked at in the previous activities and use some of the words on this list to describe the tone of each work.

image
acerbic dispassionate livid sharp
apologetic dreamy mocking somber
appalled fanciful nostalgic sweet
benevolent frivolous objective sympathetic
bitter giddy patronizing urgent
cold horrified placid vibrant
complimentary indignant provocative wry
condescending jocular sarcastic  
contemptuous joyful sentimental  

Even if you pick up on the author’s tone, it can be hard to find one perfect word to describe it. Note that we described the tone of the Jane Shore poem excerpted on page 946 as shifting from “restrained conflict to . . . dissolving tension and even contentment.” It is often a good strategy when describing the tone of a work to choose a couple of words, or even a few: “distant and vulnerable,” “giddy with a hint of madness,” “outraged and indignant, but growing curious.” It’s much easier to describe the nuance of a tone this way.

For example, look at this excerpt from the Central Text in this chapter, A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid (p. 856). Here Kincaid is describing the view that a tourist might have when visiting her native Antigua. Her tone is constantly shifting between celebratory of the beauty of her island and bitterly sarcastic toward the tourists walking on the beach.

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From there to the shore, the water is pale, silvery, clear, so clear that you can see its pinkish-white sand bottom. Oh, what beauty! Oh, what beauty! You have never seen anything like this. You are so excited. You breathe shallow. You breathe deep. You see a beautiful boy skimming the water, godlike, on a Windsurfer. You see an incredibly unattractive, fat, pastrylike-fleshed woman enjoying a walk on the beautiful sand, with a man, an incredibly unattractive, fat, pastrylike-fleshed man. [. . .]

ACTIVITY

Look over the following excerpts from readings in this chapter and try to express the tone each writer takes in at least two words; be sure to identify the subject to which the author’s tone is directed. Then, point to what diction in the excerpt most reveals the author’s tone. If you want, you can choose words from the list in the previous Activity. Remember to avoid simply labeling the tone as “happy” or “sad.”

from Free to Be Happy / Jon Meacham

In this essay, Meacham explores the meaning of “happiness” as the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular, defined it in the eighteenth century and how it applies to today.

The genius of the American experiment is the nation’s capacity to create hope in a world suffused with fear. And while we are too often more concerned with our own temporary feelings of happiness than we are with the common good, we still believe, with Jefferson, that governments are instituted to enable us to live our lives as we wish, enjoying innate liberties and freely enjoying the right to pursue happiness, which was in many ways the acme of Enlightenment ambitions for the role of politics. For Jefferson and his contemporaries — and, thankfully, for most of their successors in positions of ultimate authority — the point of public life was to enable human creativity and ingenuity and possibility, not to constrict it.

from Are Humans Necessary? / Margaret Atwood

In this essay, Atwood wonders how we will use robots in the future and what this use says about us as humans.

What fate is in store for us in The Future? Will it be a Yikes or a Hurrah? Zombie apocalypse? No more fish? Vertical urban farming? Burnout? Genetically modified humans? Will we, using our great-big-brain cleverness, manage to solve the many problems now confronting us on this planet? Or will that very same cleverness, coupled with greed and short-term thinking, prove to be our downfall? We have plenty of latitude for our speculations, since The Future is not predetermined.

Many of our proposed futures contain robots. The present also contains robots, but The Future is said to contain a lot more of them. Is that good or bad? We haven’t made up our minds. And while we’re at it, how about a robotic mind that can be made up more easily than a human one?