Analyzing Tone

[Hunter]

I have been reading several website lessons on writing a 4 sentence précis. They all mention the tone of the author.

 

How do I learn to analyze tone?

[Guest]

There are books about literary criticism which talk about analyzing tone, but one of the easiest ways to begin is to simply think about tone of voice. If you were reading this aloud as a performance, or for a book on audiotape, what tone of voice would you use? It helps sometimes to think about it in exaggerated terms, because tone can be extremely subtle.

 

Tone is basically the way the language is used to set the mood, develop characters, or otherwise underscore the book's overall message. It's often described as the author's attitude toward the subject, but it can also include an author's chosen stance in relation to readers, characters, etc. So I think it's more helpful to broaden the definition a bit and think of it is an authorial tone of voice.

[Stacy in NJ]

:confused:

Edited January 2, 2011 by Stacy in NJ

[Stacy in NJ]

frequently will tell you immediate what genre your in. It signals the overall atmosphere within which the genre develops. Sentence structure and verb and adjective use will help set tone. Syncoption, rhythm and word use add more to tone.

 

I have been reading several website lessons on writing a 4 sentence précis. They all mention the tone of the author.

 

How do I learn to analyze tone?

[forty-two]

 

This book, Voice Lessons, includes activites on how to identify tone (plus diction, detail, imagery, and syntax). Tone is defined as "the writer's (or narrator's) implied attitude toward his subject and audience", and it's the last element of the five covered, and uses the rest of the preceding elements in determining the tone. I was horrid at this in school, and never really grasped how one goes about analyzing this stuff until I saw this book. You can get a good feel for it with Amazon's Look Inside feature.

[Hunter]

KarenAnne, I still don't understand enough to be able to identify tone well enough to write about it.

 

Stacey, I'll order the book soon. I have to wait till I get my new debit card after the scare mentioned in the Bill Nye thread on the k-8 sub forum. UGH!!!!! Whyyyyyy....did I give out my debit card number when everything was screaming at me that this all did NOT sound right????

 

I'm going to go into major Amazon withdrawals, now!

[Guest]

KarenAnne, I still don't understand enough to be able to identify tone well enough to write about it.

 

 

I think tone is one of the hardest aspects of literary analysis to grasp, particularly tone in fiction. I find it much easier to understand and get hold of in poetry. You can easily put a number of love sonnets side by side, for instance, and clearly see the speaker's attitude toward love or the loved one through the language and syntax: sentimental, sweepingly romantic, ironic, bitter, skeptical, detached, etc. Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance, run the gamut in tone from romantic to satiric, from passionate to skeptical about the nature and experience of love. The tone is created from a combination of word choice and diction, syntax, word play, images, and either conformity to or rebellion against poetic conventions and the conventions of "love talk."

 

It's a lot harder with fiction, modern fiction especially, because much modern American writing is "flat" or straightforwardly realistically narrated. We don't tend to focus on the author's attitude toward the subject, the reader, or the novel's characters because the language and the way most -- by no means all -- novels are told is transparent, for lack of a better word. The author disappears and we are immersed in the world of the characters.

 

Sometimes when a novel is narrated by a particular character, the tone is easier to grasp because the language is infused by the character's mentality and perceptions. Sometimes postmodern fiction is a lot easier to read for tone because it can be pretty obviously ironic, or full of double or twisted or convoluted meanings, or they address readers directly with varying degrees of trustworthiness or satire or arrogance. Comic novels can be full of a sense of the author having fun with language or turns of events or a character's out of scale responses.

 

But most are not this easy, and because the language can seem so transparent it's easy to confuse or conflate tone with mood or diction.

 

If you are really wanting to pursue this issue, I'd start with poetry. A basic book of introduction to poetry and poetics like the Norton Introduction to Poetry (my own favorite) or Perrine's Sound and Sense can help you get going.

[Hunter]

Thanks this REALLY helps. I will start with poetry and science fiction short stories.

 

I do best with lots of short, easy, repetitive assignments to start learning something. Then when the foundation is laid I am often able to jump forward.

 

Yesterday I talked about tone with a retired science professor friend and I know she understands tone, but not so much how to teach it to a thick headed student.

 

I have trauma related memory loss and a friend with ADD, who often wants to join me in my studies. The professor loves to teach us, but sometimes doesn't know how to break things down to spoon feed us.

 

When I find just the right textbook or worksheet or lesson plan she delights in helping us. The professor will know just what to do with some books we already both have copies of.

 

Just a couple weeks ago I found two identical literature textbooks with several chapters on poetry, for $1.00 each at a book sale :-)

 

And we each have 2 books of science fiction short story anthologies that are broken up by the elements of fiction.

 

She will be able to skim these 2 resources and pick good examples.

 

THANKS :-)!!!!!

[Hunter]

This week's SOW studies are on Genesis 2, Eve, Marriage and creation vs the Big Bang. I'm trying to add in tone.

 

I looked up tone in one of my literature texts, and just laughed that they used Kate Chopin's "Story of the Hour". I don't think SOW was written for that type of marriage example...but I think it is funny and am going to use it :-) Any ideas on another short story about marriage with a very different tone?

 

For poetry, wedding and love songs would be good examples of tone, right? Any suggestions?

 

I put on hold the DVD about Michelangelo, called something like Ecstacy and Agony. Is anyone familiar enough with it to talk about the tone of that movie?

[Guest]

Hunter, try looking at a couple of Shakespeare sonnets, just because they're readily available at libraries and in collections, so you don't have to run all over the place looking for different poems.

 

#73, "That time of year thou mayst behold in me"

 

#116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"

 

#130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"

 

That gives you a good range of tonal possibilities.

 

I have not seen the movie you referred to, but I'd make a guess simply from the title -- The Agony and the Ecstasy is the language of extreme emotion; it hints at the great passions of the artist. I'd be looking for a highly romanticized view of the artist in that one!

[Hunter]

Oooohhh..thanks for the Shakespeare! My friend doing these lessons with me LOVES shakespeare. This will make a very welcome lesson for her!

 

And it will be a challenge for me. I have trouble understanding him.

 

I spend so much time teaching her. It's nice when she is far ahead of me in an area and gets the chance to seriously teach me.

 

Thanks! :-)

[justamouse]

Fist lines of books are wonderful for setting tone. The set the cadence (of which Hemmingway is king, no? ;)) is normally right there-they're high, low, wry, witty, sad...it's all in that first line (which is why a writer will organically foreshadow their ending, or wrap around and rewrite the first line when the books is done)

 

There are Gods in Alabama; Jack Daniel's, high-school quarterbacks, trucks, big **** and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches. (Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama) the board edited out a slang word for bOOks that starts with T :-) Wry, cynical and self recriminating?

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen) Can you almost hear the ironic sniff?

 

 

ROBERT COHN was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. (The Sun Also Rises, Hemmingway) there was one writer who always told other writers to start their first sentence on a whisper-this is a smidge bolder than a whisper, but it's matter of fact, a statement. Nothing bold and audacious, nothing that you could refute.

 

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs. (Jenny Crusie, Welcome to Temptation) Wry, humorous?

 

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. (To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee) She's starting with something ...not harsh, not violent (but a foreshadow), there is something startling there -it's something abrupt that she remembers and it's not a warm memory

 

I've watched through his eyes. I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. (Ender's Game, OSC) haunting, prophetic? (Speaker for the Dead's is much harder, I think)

 

On Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales wile the rest of the week it was Organon, Repetition, and Astrology. (The Once and Future King, TH White) You have just been launched into a world you don't know, but he's showing you that it has it's logic and pillars-the sum of things in that world that make it real

 

It was in Warwick that I came upon the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. (A Connecticut Yankee-Mark Twain) *pats chair* come here, sit down and let me tell you a story

 

The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Sue Monk Kidd The Secret Life of Beesthere is so much going on in this first line...

 

Anywho, that's how I begin to talk about tone...HTH

Edited January 4, 2011 by justamouse

[Hunter]

Justamouse, thank you! Thank you everyone! You have all been such a help. I really feel like I'm getting somewhere with this.

 

I really like the 4 sentence precis idea and really want to be able to use it...and do it well.

 

I want to eventually make up a worksheet to fill out as I'm reading along. I will definately add, "copy down the first sentence".