TONE

Source 1: English A: Literature for the IB Diploma. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 70. Print. Oxford IB Skills
and Practice Ser. (emphasis added)
You know about tone. You create it and you hear it from others everyday. If you are speaking to
someone with respect or admiration (or they may be speaking to you), you discern it through tone.
If you are declaring your undying love, you can do it sincerely or ironically. Tone here would be
called devoted, admiring, or ironic. If you are “talking down” or “putting someone down” you can
do it through content or tone, or both. Tone could be described as scornful or dismissive, or even
aggressive. A neutral tone is a third and common option: speaking to another as an equal in order
to inform, tell a story, conduct business. But the neutral tone is seldom uncoloured by either
positive or negative modulations. Tone is a subtle and shifting aspect of human speech.
Remember that tone is usually named in emotional terms describing the attitude the speaker holds
to the material or the audience. “Informational” or “expository” or “communicative” is not a
precise description of tone; “admiring,” “hesitant,” ‘ironic,” “defensive,” “humble,” or “arrogant”
are words that describe tone.
Source 2: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 482.
Print.
tone: The attitude of the author toward the reader or the subject matter of a literary work. An
author's tone may be serious, playful, mocking, angry, commanding, apologetic, and so forth. The
term is now often used to mean "tone of voice," a difficult-to-determine characteristic of discourse
through which writers (and each of us in our daily conversations) reveal a range of attitudes toward
everything from the subject at hand to those whom we are addressing. Some critics simply equate
tone with voice, a term referring to the authorial presence that pervades a literary work, lying
behind or beyond such things as imagery, character, plot, or even theme.
Although the terms tone and atmosphere may both be equated with mood, tone and atmosphere
are distinguished. Unlike tone, which refers to the author's attitude, atmosphere refers to the
general feeling created in the reader or audience by a work at a given point.
tone color: A phrase invented by poet Sidney Lanier in The Science of English Verse (1880) to
compare the musicality of the sounds of words to timbre in music.
Source 3: A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 507-509.
Print.
Tone (Tone Color) Tone has been used, following I. A. Richard's example, for the attitudes toward
the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. Tone may be formal, informal,
intimate, solemn, sombre, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, or many another possible
attitude.
Tone or tone color sometimes designates a musical quality in language that Sidney Lanier discussed
in The Science of English Verse, which asserts that the sounds of words have qualities equivalent to
timbre in music. "When the ear exactly coordinates a series of sounds with primary reference to
their tone-color, the result is a conception of (in music, flute-tone as distinct from violin-tone, and
the like; in verse, rhyme as opposed to rhyme, vowel varied with vowel, phonetic syzygy, and the
like), in general ... tone-color."
 ATMOSPHERE
Source 1: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 31.
Print.
atmosphere: The general feeling created in the reader or audience by a work at a given point.
Atmosphere is sometimes used as a synonym for mood, although mood has also been equated with
tone, from which atmosphere is distinguished. Unlike atmosphere, which refers to the feeling
experienced by reader or audience, tone refers to the attitude of an author toward reader or
audience, subject matter, or even himself or herself.

MOOD
Source 1: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 276.
Print.
mood: Defined by some critics as synonymous with atmosphere, by others as synonymous with
tone, and by still others as synonymous with both. Tone refers to the attitude of authors toward
their readers, toward their subject matter, and even toward themselves; atmosphere refers to the
general feeling created in the reader by the work at a given point, which may be entirely different
from the tone. The atmosphere of a work may be oppressive without its tone being so, although the
two inevitably affect one another. Mood is probably closer to atmosphere than to tone, but as a
general term, it can correctly be applied to either. One could say that an author creates a somber
mood (thereby using it as a synonym for atmosphere), and one could also say that an author's mood
is somber (thereby using it as a synonym for tone to describe the author's attitude toward the
audience or subject matter).
Source 2: A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 329. Print.
Mood In a literary work the mood is the emotional-intellectual attitude of the author toward the
subject. A group of poems about death may range from a mood of noble defiance in Donne's
"Death, Be Not Proud," to pathos in Frost's "Out, Out –," to irony in Housman's "To an Athlete Dying
Young," to morbidly joyous acceptance in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
If a distinction exists between mood and TONE, it will be the fairly subtle one between mood as the
attitude of the author toward the subject and TONE as the attitude of the author toward the
audience. In cases where the writer uses ostensible "authors" within the work, mood and TONE can
be quite distinct, as in Irving's use of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Byron, in canto III of Don Juan, has "a
poet" (presumably Southey) write a poem beginning "The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!",
which seems solemn, brave, and freedom-loving in mood; yet the tone of Byron (not the mood of
the imaginary "poet") is mocking and satiric.

Purvis’ note: Tone and mood are not interchangeable terms. If you are going to say “the tone and mood
of the text,” you must defend these separately as different authorial choices. If you’re using them
synonymously, you’re wasting words. What does “tone and mood” accomplish that “tone” does not,
especially if you are only proving a singular point.