Tone in literature is the attitude a piece of writing takes toward its subject and its reader: amused, grave, bitter, tender, ironic, detached. Writers rarely name it. They build it from choices, chiefly diction, sentence structure, imagery, the details they include and the point of view they tell the story from, which is why two writers can describe the same funeral and leave one reader laughing and another grieving. To find the tone of a passage, ask how the writer or narrator feels about what is on the page.
For words to name a tone, see the tone words list. This page shows how tone is made, using public-domain passages, then covers shifts, voice and style, and a practice set.
What tone means in literature
Tone is an attitude, so it always has an object. A narrator can be fond of a character, scornful of a town and solemn about a death in the same chapter. The word names the attitude, not the topic: a war story can be bitter, nostalgic or absurd, and the war is the same in each. Tone also takes in the reader. A narrator who confides in “you” sounds intimate; one who lectures sounds formal, or superior.
Whose attitude is it? In a poem, the speaker's; in a novel, the narrator's; in an essay, the writer's. The author stands behind all of them and can feel differently from the voice on the page. That gap is where irony lives, and it is why some of the most interesting tones take two words to describe: earnest on the surface, mocking underneath.
How writers create tone
Few writers announce “the tone of this chapter is wistful.” Readers infer tone from choices made in every sentence, and five kinds of choice do most of the work.
| Tool | What to look at | Example below |
|---|---|---|
| ToolDiction | What to look atConnotation, formality, plain or elaborate words | Example belowAusten on Mr. Collins |
| ToolSyntax | What to look atSentence length, word order, rhythm, hedging | Example belowCrane and Melville |
| ToolImagery | What to look atMetaphors, similes and sensory pictures | Example belowOwen's soldiers |
| ToolDetail | What to look atWhat the writer dwells on and what is left out | Example belowMansfield's garden party |
| ToolPoint of view | What to look atWho tells the story and how much they understand | Example belowHuck Finn on mourning poems |
Diction: which words
Diction is word choice: plain or elaborate, formal or slangy, warm or cold in connotation. Words with the same dictionary meaning can carry opposite attitudes (the guide to connotative words sorts 45 sets of them), and a writer who keeps choosing from one end of the scale sets the tone without comment. Formality is the other lever.
Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part of his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and miserly father…
The word that gives the attitude away is “deficiency”: a clinical term for stupidity, delivered as if from a doctor's report. “Not a sensible man” says less than it means, and Austen never calls Mr. Collins a fool. The measured, Latinate words do it with a straight face, and the tone is dry, mocking irony. The effect on the reader is a separate thing. We laugh, and we look forward to every scene he enters. That pleasure is ours; the contempt is Austen's.
Syntax: how the sentences run
Syntax is the shape of sentences: length, order, rhythm, how much they qualify. Short, flat statements sound certain, clipped or numb. Long, hedged sentences sound careful, leisurely or pleased with themselves.
None of them knew the color of the sky.
Four men are adrift in a dinghy after a shipwreck, watching the waves too closely to look up. Crane gives it one plain, negative sentence with no adjectives and no alarm. The tone is detached and unsentimental: a narrator who won't pretend the sea cares.
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners.
Count the hedges: “rather,” “more than ordinary,” “what would seem,” “somewhat,” “nothing that I know of.” The sentence takes its time reaching its subject. The syntax is the man, a comfortable lawyer, cautious, genial and a little pleased with his own fairness, and the story goes on to test how far that fairness stretches.
Imagery and figurative language
Images carry judgment. Compare a woman to a hawk or to a hen and you have shown how you feel about her. Owen sets young soldiers beside the most degraded figures he can find.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
The comparisons to beggars and hags strip away grandeur; sludge makes the effort physical. The lines make no argument against war, yet the tone is already bitter and exhausted, because the images leave no room for a heroic picture.
Detail: what gets included
Every description is a selection. What a writer dwells on, and what never appears, shows an attitude, often more honestly than adjectives do.
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud.
“If they had ordered it” is the family's own idiom slipped into the narration: these are people used to ordering things. The tone is breezy and delighted, with a thin edge of satire, and the selection is part of it: weather, lawns and roses, and not yet a glance at the cottages below the house.
Point of view: who is telling
The narrator's position can shape tone more than any single word. In the Grangerford chapters, Huck Finn is dazzled by a genteel family's house, manners and art, which lets Twain mock them through his admiration.
Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. … The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker—the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler.
Huck is praising Emmeline Grangerford, a daughter of the house who has since died: she was fast, devoted and beaten only once, by a hard rhyme. Twain is sending up the era's sentimental mourning verse. The narrator's tone is earnest and admiring; the author's is comic. Point of view lets one sentence carry both.
How tone shifts within a work
Few long works keep one tone throughout, and many short ones turn once, hard. Writers often mark a shift, so look for a turn word (“but,” “yet,” “then”), a section or stanza break, a sudden change in sentence length, or a new kind of detail. Owen's poem moves through three tones, and you can hear each change in the words. The opening lines are long and slow, with heavy verbs (“cursed,” “trudge”). At “Gas! GAS!” the words shrink to single syllables and capitals. In the last stanza the poem turns to “you” and “My friend.”
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
“My friend” sounds polite and isn't. It addresses anyone who repeats Horace's line that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, and it calls the line a lie. Weary, frantic, accusatory: one subject, three attitudes.
Mansfield shifts from bright to hushed. Scott, a young carter from the cottages below, is thrown from his horse and killed, and when Laura wants the party stopped her mother tells her, “You are being very absurd, Laura.” Afterward Laura visits the widow's cottage, sees the dead man and says to him, “Forgive my hat.” Talking to her brother afterward, she can't finish a sentence: “Isn't life,” she stammered, “isn't life—” Compare the opening's sentences, complete and sure of themselves (“They could not have had a more perfect day”), with this one, which breaks off. The satire is gone. What replaces it is tender and bewildered.
In your own drafts, a break and a concrete reason in the scene help a reader follow a deliberate shift. If a shift feels accidental, check what changed in the scene or in the narrator's attention.
Tone vs voice vs style
The three overlap, but they answer different questions. Voice is who seems to be talking, style is how the writing is built, and tone is how it feels about its subject at a given moment.
| Tone | Voice | Style | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | ToneThe attitude of a passage toward its subject and reader | VoiceThe recognizable personality behind the words | StyleThe habitual choices of words, sentences and figures |
| Question to ask | ToneHow does the writing feel about this? | VoiceWho is talking? | StyleHow is it built? |
| How often it changes | ToneFrom scene to scene, even line to line | VoiceLittle across a book | StyleSlowly, or on purpose for a project |
| In Huckleberry Finn | ToneAdmiring in Chapter 17, shaken in Chapter 18 | VoiceHuck: a boy's grammar, dialect and innocence | StyleDialect spelling, long plain sentences linked by “and” |
One chapter after the Emmeline passage, the Grangerford feud ends in killings by the river, and Huck's tone breaks: “I ain't a-going to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that.” Set it beside the Emmeline sentence. There, he piles up praise (“she would be on hand with her ‘tribute’”); here, he refuses to describe at all. Same grammar, same boy. The voice holds; the tone changes.
Mood, the fourth term in the tangle, is the feeling the reader is left with. It belongs to the reader rather than the writing, which is why the mistakes below keep the two apart. In brand writing, tone of voice bundles voice and tone into one description a whole company can follow.
Mistakes when naming a tone
- Naming the subject instead of the attitude. “The tone is death” describes the topic. Dickens opens A Christmas Carol (1843) with “Marley was dead: to begin with,” then jokes about door-nails. The subject is death; the tone is chatty and comic.
- Naming your own feeling. “Scary” and “sad” describe the reader's reaction, which is mood. “Menacing” and “mournful” describe what the writing is doing.
- Taking the narrator's word for it. Huck admires Emmeline's poems; Twain doesn't. With an unreliable narrator, name both attitudes.
- One word for a work that shifts. “The Garden Party” is neither cheerful nor sad. Name the tone of each part, then say where it turns.
- No evidence. “The tone is negative” fits almost anything. Every tone word should point to a phrase you can quote.
Practice: name the tone
Name the tone of each passage in one or two words, and find the phrase that proves it.
- “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1817)
- “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed 1895)
- “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” (Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, 1863)
- “Room 4 had been my mother's for six years. The new resident would arrive on Friday, the manager explained, and the cards on the windowsill could be collected from the front desk at my convenience.” (Original example)
- “The council, in its wisdom, has decided that what the library needed was fewer books and a larger coffee bar.” (Original example)
- Playful and mock-solemn. “Supposed her born to be an heroine” borrows the grand manner of the novels Austen is teasing.
- Imperious on Lady Bracknell's part, comic on Wilde's: she treats losing both parents as a lapse in manners.
- Humble and solemn. Lincoln shrinks his own words to honor the dead, and “say here” against “did here” carries the weight.
- Restrained, with grief underneath. The narrator repeats the institution's phrases without comment, and the distance between them and the loss is the tone.
- Sardonic. “In its wisdom” means the opposite of what it says, and “a larger coffee bar” is the jab.
Revise a paragraph for tone
The five tools are most useful in revision, where you can change one at a time. Here is a flat draft and two revisions aimed at two tone words chosen first: dry and affectionate. The first adds nothing and changes only diction and syntax. The second also invents details, which is a different operation.
Draft. My father's hardware store closed in March after forty-one years. He was sad about it but said it was time. On the last day, many customers came to say goodbye, and he gave away the remaining stock.
Revision 1: no new facts. Dad's hardware store closed in March after forty-one years. It was time, he said. On the last day, customer after customer came in to say goodbye, and he gave away what was left on the shelves.
Revision 2: new details. Dad's hardware store closed in March, forty-one years after it opened and about thirty after it stopped making money. He said it was time, in the voice he used for changing the furnace filter. On the last day half of Millbrook came by to shake his hand, and he sent each of them home with something: a box of hinges, a coil of garden hose, the left-handed work glove nobody had wanted since 1994.
In both revisions “Dad” moves the narrator closer, and “sad” is gone, so the reader has to hear the feeling in “It was time, he said.” Revision 1 does the rest with syntax: “customer after customer” turns a count into a procession. Revision 2 goes further by inventing. Its first sentence saves its joke for the end, where the stress falls. The furnace filter shows a man who handles loss as a chore, and “many customers” becomes half a town and one unsold glove, which is where the affection lives. Those details are the strongest part of it, and in fiction they are yours to invent; in memoir or reporting they have to be true.
Keep your two tone words where you will see them: in a novel's story bible, they sit next to the point of view and tense, so each new chapter can be checked against all three. To hear what a change did, select the draft and its revision together and ask the Strokes Assistant what changed in the attitude, word by word. It can misread irony, as readers do, so treat its answer as a second reading.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between tone and voice?
Voice is the recognizable personality of a writer or narrator, the way Huck Finn always sounds like Huck. Tone is the attitude of a particular passage, and it changes: Huck is admiring in one chapter and horrified in the next while his voice stays the same. In business writing the two are often bundled together as "tone of voice."
How do you identify the tone of a passage?
Ask how the writer or narrator feels about the subject, then gather evidence: loaded words, the length and shape of the sentences, the images, which details get space and which are missing, and who is telling the story. Name the attitude with one or two precise words, and tie each word to a phrase you can quote.
Is tone the same as mood?
No. Tone is the attitude the writing takes; mood is the feeling the reader is left with. They often match, as in a grim story told grimly, but they can split on purpose: a narrator who stays calm while describing something terrible can leave the reader more disturbed than an alarmed narrator would.
