Compare passages for tone
Key Notes :
🔹 What is Tone?
- Tone is the author’s attitude or feeling toward the subject, character, or audience.
- It is conveyed through the author’s word choice, sentence structure, and details.
🔹 Common Tone Words
- Positive: cheerful, excited, hopeful, humorous, loving
- Negative: angry, sarcastic, bitter, hopeless, gloomy
- Neutral: objective, factual, serious, calm, formal
🔹 How to Identify Tone
- Read carefully – Understand what the author is saying.
- Look at word choice – Are the words positive, negative, or neutral?
- Check punctuation – Exclamation marks can show excitement or anger.
- Notice details – What is included or left out?
- Think about the purpose – Is the author trying to inform, entertain, criticize, or persuade?
🔹 Comparing Tone in Two Passages
| Step | What to Do |
|---|---|
| 1. Read both passages | Understand the main idea and mood of each. |
| 2. Identify the tone | Use tone words to describe how each author feels. |
| 3. Find clues | Highlight words or phrases that show tone. |
| 4. Compare | Are the tones similar or different? Explain how. |
| 5. Support with evidence | Use quotes from the text to support your analysis. |
🔹 Sample Comparison
Passage A: Uses cheerful words like “bright,” “joyful,” and “lively.”
Tone: Happy and enthusiastic.
Passage B: Uses negative words like “dreary,” “lifeless,” and “cold.”
Tone: Sad and gloomy.
Comparison: Passage A is upbeat and joyful, while Passage B feels depressing and lifeless.
Learn with an example
🤜 Select the passage that has a more childish tone.
Tommy Grimes was sometimes a good boy and sometimes a bad boy. When he was a bad boy, he was a very bad boy.
The boy was allowed to read what he liked and devoured Grimm’s Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom and The Arabian Nights. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of wonder.
Adapted from Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales and Herbert Paul, The Life of Froude
The first passage is more childish in tone. It uses basic vocabulary and sing-song repetition, whereas the other passage uses more sophisticated vocabulary and sentence structure.
🤜 Select the passage that has a more biting tone.
When Edna entered the dining room one evening, an unusually animated conversation seemed to be going on. Several persons were talking at once.
They were always engaged in some little discussion or trivial dispute in whispering voices. Though Catherine’s supporting opinion was frequently called for, she was never able to give it because she hadn’t heard a word of the conversation.
Adapted from Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
The second passage is more biting in tone. It expresses negativity towards the trivial disputes conducted in whispering voices that make Catherine unable to participate in the conversation. The other passage is more detached and unemotional toward its subject.
🤜 Select the passage that has a more agitated tone.
I told the doctor that I had a peculiar feeling in my chest. In five minutes he was pounding my midriff in. And the questions that man asked! He began with my grandparents, roamed through my childhood and youth, dissected my teenage years, and finally came down to coffee and what I ate for breakfast.
The doctor was sitting in an easy chair and swinging his hat, which he held in both hands, and he was thinking. Except for him, there was not a soul in the room. The sun had set, and the shades of evening began settling in the corners under the furniture.
Adapted from Lloyd Osbourne, ‘Jones’ and Anton Chekhov, ‘The Doctor’
The first passage is more agitated in tone. It uses exclamations (And the questions that man asked!) and hyperbole (pounding my midriff in) to show that the character is unsettled. The other passage establishes a more somber tone with phrases such as not a soul in the room and shades of evening.
let’s practice!
