Tone

Tone Tone is a writer’s “attitude” or “voice.” Take a poem by Sylvia Plath—you should know the author even if her name does not appear. You can tell it’s plath by her cold, sarcastic, and sometimes brutal tone. Or take Robert Frost—all those vowels and assonance—you should know his writing even without his name attached. Or Emily Dickinson or Edgar A. Poe—their tone is unmistakeable. Which of you doesn’t know Bob Dylan when you hear him sing' Or Elvis—the tone is very distinctive. Style is the way an author puts words, sentences and paragraphs together. Earnest Hemingway uses short words and sentences. He is like reading the newspaper—very simple. William Faulkner, on the other hand, uses long words and one sentence may run for pages and be filled with parenthetical expressions, many subordinate clauses, elipses, and etc. Style is the technical aspect of an author’s writing. In “The Last Moon” by Andre Dubus the tone is cold and detached. This suits tone, style, know, words, sentences, love, writing, while, triangle, three, take, simple, should, sentence, parenthetical, name, mother, light, first, expressions, even, cold, brother, author, writer’s, world, woman, without, wistful, william, wedge, way, vowels, voice, very