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Tone and Mood. More fun and games in AP Land. TONE. The writer’s or the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter of the work. Mood.
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Tone and Mood More fun and games in AP Land
TONE • The writer’s or the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter of the work.
Mood • The atmosphere that pervades a literary work with the intention of evoking a certain emotion or feeling from the audience. In drama or film, mood may be created by sets, lighting, sound effects and music as well as words.
Compare these clips http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuWf9fP-A-U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic 1. Jot down your impressions: • Use of music • Lighting • Diction examples 2. Then choose 3 tone words that seem to reflect the filmmaker’s tone.
Tone controls our understanding and our interpretations. By creating a specific tone, a writer, like a filmmaker, influences • How we react to his work • What we understand about his message
Tone To misinterpret tone is to misinterpret meaning! Activity purpose: To demonstrate how tone controls our perceptions and interpretations.
Labeling a tone is not difficult… Proving we are correct, however, requires a bit more analytical muscle!
Being able to detect a writer’s tone • Will always lead to meaning. • To do so requires close reading, which is to pay attention to a number of different resources of language all at the same time.
D-I-D-L-S DICTION-IMAGERY-DETAILS-LANGUAGE-SYNTAX
Diction The author’s choice of words and their connotations Questions to think about: • Which words have been chosen specifically for their effects? • What are the connotative qualities of these words? • What effect do these words have on the reader’s mood? • What might they indicate about the author’s tone (attitude)? “..a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and baskingease.”
Imagery Words that have a vivid appeal to the senses. Imagery is different from “details” because of its appeal to the senses. Questions… • What images do you notice? • What senses do these appeal to? • Are the images positive, negative, plain, dull… • What effect do the images have on the reader’s mood? • What to the images seem to suggest about the author’s tone/attitude. “…his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wall-paper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box… over his painted wooden bed…”
Details Facts that do not have a strong sensory appeal Questions… • What details did the author specifically include? Are there any obvious details that the author did not include? • What might they imply? • What are the connotative possibilities of the details? • What effect do these included (and maybe excluded) details have on the mood and tone? “It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and where the businessmen of moderate means begot and reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school…all of whom were exactly alike as their homes…”
Language Characteristics of the BODY of words used. Language refers to how we can describe the kind of words used by a character or in the story as a whole, such as “scholarly” or “old-fashioned” or “slang.” Questions… • How could the overall language be described? • How does the language effect mood and/or tone? “On seasonable Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out on their front ‘stoops’…talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords.”
Syntax The way the sentences and paragraphs are constructed. Questions… • What are the sentences like? • Do they have multiple phrases and/or clauses? • Any pattern in length or type? • What impact does this have on mood/tone? “He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.”
