Tone, in written composition, is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience. Tone is generally conveyed through the choice of words or the viewpoint of a writer on a particular subject.
Every written piece comprises a central theme or subject matter. The manner in which a writer approaches this theme and subject is the tone. The tone can be formal, informal, serious, comic, sarcastic, sad, and cheerful or it may be any other existing attitudes. Consider the following examples of tone:
- “I want to ask the authorities what is the big deal? Why do not they control the epidemic? It is eating up lives like a monster.”
- “I want to draw the attention of the concerned authorities toward damage caused by an epidemic. If steps were 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 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:
Father: “We are going on a vacation.”
Son: “That’s great!!!”
– The tone of son’s response is very cheerful.
Father: “We can’t go on vacation this summer.”
Son: “Ok. Great! That’s what I expected.”
– The son’s tone is sarcastic in the given response.
“You will get good grades like in the previous exams”
– The tone is pessimistic in this example.
“Can someone tell me what the hell is going on here?”
–This has an aggressive tone.
Examples of Tone in Literature
Tone has a significant place in literature as it manifests writers’ attitude toward different subjects.
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.
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 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.
“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.
Function of Tone
Tone, in a piece of literature, decides how they 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. In addition, tone lends shape and life to a piece of literature because it creates a mood.
Moreover, tone bestows voice to characters and it throws light on the personalities and dispositions of characters that readers understand better.