Analyze the Writer's Tone: Lesson and Activity
On their own, words don’t say much. Place them in key parts of a story, however, and let them interact and contrast with other words, and you get magic.
For example, “Ring worms from kittens” sounds disgusting.
And “My father rolled over in a canoe with his clothes on,” sounds frightening, or perhaps hilarious.
Put these same phrases in the context of a story, however, and let them interact with other words and descriptions, and you get an essay that elicits feelings of nostalgia and the innocent glee of childhood, family vacations, and nature.
Analyzing the tone of a piece of writing takes practice. You must not only address the rhetorical situation, but you must also scrutinize the author’s word choices. Think: why does the writer use the words that they do? And how do these words convey the writer’s attitude towards what they are writing about?
Here are three excerpts of famous essays to help you practice analyzing a writer’s tone. Your mission is to read the excerpts and describe the tone that is being conveyed.
For E.B. White’s essay “Once more to the lake,” you could write
By using specific examples from his childhood summer trips, E.B. White conveys a nostalgic tone that demonstrates the vividness and inescapability childhood memories have on the psyche.
Now it is your turn to analyze a writer’s tone. Good luck.
Friday Night Lights
By H.G. Bissinger
Sports Illustrated Magazine
The faithful sat on little stools of orange and blue under the merciless lights of the high school cafeteria, but the spartan setting didn't bother them a bit. Had the booster club's Watermelon Feed been held inside the county jail, or on a sinking ship, or on the side of a craggy mountain, these fans would still have flocked there.
Outside, the August night was cool and serene, with just a wisp of West Texas wind. Inside, there was a sense of excitement and also relief, for the waiting was basically over—no more sighs of longing, no more awkward groping to fill up the empty spaces of time with golf games and thoroughly unsatisfying talk about baseball. Tonight the boys of Permian High School in Odessa would come before the crowd, one by one, to be introduced. And in less than two weeks, on the first Friday night in September, the march to state—to the Texas high school championship finals—would begin with the first game of the season.
Why I Write
By Joan Didion
Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I
I
I
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
Mother Tongue by Amy Tan
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as 'broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
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