Teaching Tone: My 3 Commandments

Teaching tone

Teaching tone is a difficult thing, especially for high schoolers.

Since it is such a challenge, it doesn’t get its due diligence but it is one of the most important literacy skills a reader needs to possess.

Here are some common problems I have run into in my classroom when teaching tone:

  • They don’t know what it means.
  • They know the definition but they don’t know how to apply it to a text.
  • They think it means the author’s attitude, they don’t understand it reflects the speaker or narrator.
  • They confuse tone with mood.
  • They can recognize it on a basic, glaring level, like when a speaker is sad or angry.
  • They see tone as one consistent attitude, but they struggle to see how it changes or shifts.

It is not hard to understand why this is a struggle. Nowadays, it feels like we all exist in the attention-grabbing worlds of our curation. We crop photos on Instagram, add filters to Snapchat, and reduce thoughts and emotions to 140 characters on Twitter.

We are the centers of our universe. To understand tone, we need to step outside our minds and adopt an empathetic framework. That is hard enough for adults, let alone adolescents. Teaching tone is about creating a mind shift by encouraging readers to be perceptive to the clues and signals that indicate someone’s attitude toward a subject.

That isn’t easy.

A Working Definition of Tone

Teaching school

It’s not hard to see why this is a struggle. In today’s world, we all live in our own curated bubbles, where we crop photos on Instagram, add filters to Snapchat, and reduce thoughts and emotions to 140 characters on X.

To understand tone, we need to step outside our minds and adopt an empathetic framework, which is hard enough for adults, let alone adolescents.

So, what’s the solution?

We need to create a mind shift by encouraging readers to be perceptive to the clues and signals that indicate someone’s attitude toward a subject.

That’s what teaching tone is all about.

Let’s start with a working definition of tone. Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry defines tone as “the writer’s or speaker’s attitude toward his subject, his audience, or himself.

It is the emotional coloring, or the emotional meaning, of the work and is an extremely important part of the full meaning.” However, the explanation of tone in the chapter focuses on recognizing it in spoken language, which is easier than recognizing it in word choice.

So, how do you get your students to recognize tone in a text? The key is to focus on three things:

3. Forward Design/Backward Design

teacher at school

All pieces of literature have a tone of some sort. Authors create tone through two primary literary elements, diction and syntax, yet it is also enhanced by details, imagery, and figurative language.

I have my students circle the words in a passage that they feel are important–the words that seem to reflect what the speaker is feeling or thinking. Then I ask them to characterize the syntax. Finally, we look at the simplified tone sheet (you can get a free copy below) and see which words correspond to the evidence that was gathered.

You can get a lot fancier and have students create color charts or illustrations and images, but I have found the simple repetitive practice of observing the diction and details, characterizing the syntax, and drawing conclusions about tone ingrains the habit.

My students and I do this with nearly every poem that we study.

Eventually, when the practice becomes a habit, we switch from forward development of tone–moving from evidence to conclusion)– to backward design. In backward design, students identify the tone first and then look for the evidence in the text to support it.

This shift occurs later in the year once students have the close-reading proficiency to intuitively recognize tone because they can synthesize the evidence automatically.

2. Use a List for Reference, Not Memorization

studying and memorizing

I know the logic–if you want students to master something, you have them memorize and study it comprehensively. However, I have found that practicing the skill is more valuable than studying and memorizing it. In the past I had students memorize a list of 50-60 tone words, and sometimes I would even quiz them on it.

I didn’t find it to be an effective practice.

My students memorized words for the sake of memorization. They did it for the assessment at hand but it did little to expand their vocabulary or develop its application in context.

Using the list for reference is a more organic approach to tone development. There are only 35 words on the list, many of which are already familiar to them. There are a few that may be new, but these are words they are likely to have heard before, and there are not enough to be overwhelming.

Using the list as a reference, and with repetitive practice, students will develop the skill with greater fluency than memorizing a set of words and being quizzed on them.

1. Focus on the Shifts

exploring poems

Helen Vendler provides a checklist for exploring poems in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. She encourages readers to observe a poem’s skeleton and consider “the emotional curve on which the whole poem is strung,” recognizing “the pieces of the emotional curve — the changes in tone in the speaker’s voice as the poem goes along.”

Whether it be prose or poetry, entire works and even close-reading passages rarely strike one note. Tone changes. Recognizing these subtleties of difference and observing how a speaker’s attitude changes, show a complex understanding of a text.

When we are looking at the tone in my class, I always ask, “Where does it shift? Where do you see a change?” We do this with prose and poetry. A great passage to do this with is the Cardinal Wolsey soliloquy from Henry VIII on the 2009 AP exam. If students can recognize the causes in the shift, they are can see the complexities of context, character, and situation.

When teaching tone, remember that:

  1. Repetitive practice builds skill.
  2. Lists are useful as references but not for memorization.
  3. And shifts matter.

How Do You Explain Tone to Students?

Start by defining what tone is and why it matters in writing.

Then provide examples of different tones in literature, such as happy, sad, angry, sarcastic, and so on.

Read passages from texts with different tones and discuss how they feel while reading them.

You can also ask them to write a short passage in different tones to demonstrate how tone can change the meaning and mood of the writing.

Another useful technique is to have students practice identifying the tone of a piece of writing by looking for clues in the language used, such as word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation.

What Are the 4 Components of Tone?

  • Attitude: This refers to the writer’s emotional disposition towards the subject matter. It can be positive, negative, or neutral.
  • Diction: A specific choice of words and language used to convey the writer’s message. It can be formal, informal, technical, or colloquial.
  • Syntax: How sentences are structured and arranged in a piece of writing. It can be complex, simple, fragmented, or varied.
  • Imagery: This refers to the use of vivid and descriptive language to create mental images in the reader’s mind. It can be figurative, literal, or symbolic.

How can teachers help students use tone effectively in their writing?

Teachers can encourage students to think carefully about the tone they want to convey in their writing and provide guidance on how to create that tone through word choice and other literary devices.

They can also provide opportunities for students to practice writing in different tones and receive feedback on their work.

What are some common mistakes students make when using tone in their writing?

Some common mistakes include using an inappropriate tone for the audience or purpose of the writing, being inconsistent with tone throughout the piece, or using a tone that is too extreme or inappropriate for the subject matter.

Teachers can help students avoid these mistakes by providing clear guidelines and examples for how to use tone effectively in different types of writing.

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