ENG I Pre-AP

TONE & MOOD

Tone and Mood both…

•deal with the emotions centered around a piece of writing. Though they seem similar and can in fact be related causally, they are in fact quite different.

Tone is…

•Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. While journalistic writing theoretically has a tone of distance and objectivity, all other writing can have various tones.

Tone Example

• If we were to read a description of a first date that included words and phrases like “dreaded” and “my buddies forced me to go on the date”, we could assume that the individual didn’t really enjoy the date.

Positive, Negative, and Neutral • Positive: Admiring, adoring, calm, confident, joyful, lively, playful, and romantic.• Neutral: Commanding, direct, impartial, objective, questioning, and understated.• Negative: Abhorring, angry, annoyed, anxious, bossy, cold, despairing, and pretentious.

Mood is…

•Mood is the atmosphere of a piece of writing; it’s the emotions a selection arouses in a reader.

Mood Examples• One good way to see mood (and, to a degree, tone) in action is through genre-crossing movie trailers. In film editing classes throughout the States, a common assignment is to take an existing film (say, a comedy) and create a film preview that presents the film as a different genre (for example, a horror film). This is accomplished through editing and splicing scenes, adding new, anxiety-producing music and sound effects, and adding a new voice-over introduction.

• http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/marypopp ins1.mp4 • http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/shining.mp4

Your turn!• Pick a popular fairytale, movie, or story, and change the tone and mood! (You may shorten it by summarizing or only use a section of the work.)• You will need to:• Get in a group of 3-4 people.• Find the original work you would like to recreate.• Recreate the work by changing the tone and mood (try going

the opposite direction).• Coming up with a visual to present the to the class

(PowerPoint, video, artwork, etc.)