Creative and Critical Thinking: What If?
Creative and Critical Thinking
Tone, Mood and Voice
- Tone is the emotional colouring of a piece of writing. It reflects the author's attitude and the feelings that he or she puts into the writing. It can, for instance, be angry, demanding, or humorous. The author controls the tone by choosing diction, sentence structure, and figurative language that will heighten the desired effect on the reader. Here is a list of words that can be used to describe tone.
- Mood, by contrast, is the emotional feeling that the reader gets from the writing. Usually the mood is clearly related to the tone, for the tone creates the mood of the reader. Mood is also affected by figurative language, sentence structure, and diction.
- Voice, if you are thinking along the movie analogy, is a role that the writer takes on while writing. We say the writer writes "in the voice" of someone . . . A personal voice is an expression of a writer's own thoughts and personality. For example, an autobiographical story or personal narrative about an event from the author's childhood might be written as though the author were telling the story in person.
- A persona is a voice created by the writer to help the reader accept the ideas in the writing. For instance, a murder mystery might be told in the voice of a detective. The reader knows the writer is not actually a detective, but the use of words and images from the world of criminal investigation helps make the story come alive. Or, a persuasive essay can be written in the voice of an expert, using impersonal language and a tone of authority. In poetry, the voice may sound very personal, but can actually be a persona the writer has created. There is often no way for the reader to tell.