One of the biggest challenges in analyzing style is understanding and identifying the tone of a piece. True, Muir writes about the importance of saving the redwoods, but how does he get you to feel it’s important too? We often consider tone and mood together: tone is the speaker’s attitude toward the subject as revealed by his or her choice of language, and mood is the feeling created by the work. Make sure you take the time to consider both. As always, it’s important to be able to support your description of tone and mood with evidence from the text.

We’ve been looking closely at how Muir’s language supports his purpose. Now let’s pull back a bit and try to see the big picture. Overall, what is his language like? Does it stay consistent, or does it shift? The piece begins with passionate pleas developed through personification and even spiritualization of the trees. Then Muir shifts to a more measured and logical approach, before concluding with an emotional plea. Because it shifts a few times in this piece, we can’t accurately use one word to describe the tone. Passionate would be close, but it would not capture the logical middle portion of the essay. This is why you are generally better off using a couple (or even a few) words when describing tone in a piece as complex as this one. For instance, we might describe the tone of this piece as passionate and spiritual yet realistic and even optimistic. Using yet in a description of tone is a simple way to signal that it shifts occasionally in the piece. A common way of describing tone that is consistent throughout a piece, yet still complex, is with an adverb and an adjective pairing, such as “warmly didactic” or “begrudgingly generous.”