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Web Literacy: Tone 3634 Views


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Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:06

Power in Literature

00:07

Web Literacy

00:09

Tone

00:10

[ dog barks ]

00:11

What does tone convey in writing?

00:14

Tone is just the author's attitude toward whatever they're writing.

00:17

Plain and simple.

00:19

One really important thing is to not confuse tone and style.

00:23

Tone and writing style are two different things.

00:24

People confuse them all the time.

00:26

If you go to any of our Shmoop guides,

00:27

you'll see a section on tone and a section on style.

00:29

So that can help you figure that out.

00:31

Writing style is like getting into the nitty-gritty.

00:35

"Short sentences" or "Doesn't use punctuation."

00:39

Or you might call someone Hemingway-esque.

00:42

That's because of the writing style -

00:43

short sentences, very simple.

00:44

The tone is the author's attitude toward what they're writing.

00:48

So that would be, "The author's writing is ironic"

00:53

or "It's cynical" or whatever the case is.

00:56

Some examples:

00:57

Nick Carraway, probably the most famous narrator

01:00

in all of literature --

01:02

all of American literature.

01:03

This is a cynical narrator.

01:05

And sometimes the author's attitude toward the text

01:10

comes through the narrator in this case.

01:12

Other times it's the author themselves

01:15

when there's a third person omniscient narrator.

01:19

But Nick Carraway is a cynical narrator.

01:21

He is saying what he thinks,

01:24

and he doesn't like what he sees.

01:25

He'll say things like,

01:26

"Oh, I felt like I was talking to a child."

01:28

Or, "These people -- They're idiots, basically."

01:32

He's looking at what's happening

01:34

around him and judging it.

01:35

And so while Fitzgerald's style may be one way or another,

01:40

and while he may use insanely big words --

01:44

these like five-dollar words and we don't understand any of it,

01:45

that's the writing style.

01:47

The tone is cynical.

01:48

The tone is how Nick Carraway,

01:50

and thus Fitzgerald,

01:52

feels about what is happening in the plot.

01:55

Then we compare that to

01:57

something like Orwell.

01:59

Like Animal Farm.

02:00

So George Orwell was an essayist.

02:02

So his tone is a lot more removed. We'd call that objective.

02:06

He writes, you know, reading Animal Farm,

02:09

and he'll just be like,

02:10

"The pigs tore each other to shreds."

02:12

Like no judgment.

02:15

There's no, "And that was bad." or "And that was good."

02:18

Right, so it's a journalist.

02:19

It's actively neutral.

02:21

Exactly, exactly.

02:22

And that brings up kind of a big issue with tone.

02:25

What tone allows us to see

02:27

is whether a text is subjective or objective.

02:30

We're talking about literature here,

02:31

but for what pertains to this course,

02:33

and we're talking about web literacy.

02:35

This is how you can tell

02:36

if a source on the Internet is objective or subjective.

02:40

Objective means it's just the facts.

02:42

The author's opinion and attitude is not in there.

02:46

And I can argue, though, how could it not be?

02:49

In that that's a conscious decision.

02:51

And by making it appear as if it's just the facts,

02:54

you get this journalistic --

02:55

Or what journalism used to be 50 years ago.

02:57

You get this journalistic credibility

02:59

- that it's actually honest and it's not politically biased - Yeah.

03:02

- and so on. - Yeah, you're one step ahead of me.

03:03

That's exactly right.

03:04

So even -- We go back to Orwell.

03:06

Clearly Orwell was trying to make a point with Animal Farm.

03:09

He was not objective.

03:11

But when you write in a way that makes it seem like you're objective,

03:15

you sound more credible.

03:16

That's why it's very dangerous,

03:17

especially with sources on the web,

03:19

to just say, like you said, "It's a journal article.

03:22

It's from the New York Times or it's from whatever it's from.

03:26

Oh, yeah, it's news."

03:28

No. You have to look at a lot of different issues,

03:30

which we'll get to.

03:32

But the first step in figuring out

03:35

if you can trust a source on the Internet

03:38

is to decide

03:39

are we leaning toward objective

03:40

or are we leaning toward subjective?

03:42

Some pieces, as you mentioned,

03:44

are written, "Oh this is totally objective."

03:47

whether or not it is.

03:48

Others are written with no pretense of being objective.

03:51

An opinion piece in a newspaper.

03:54

And you know right then and there,

03:55

"Okay, this is gonna be subjective."

03:57

And knowing whether something is objective or subjective

03:59

changes a ton about how you read it.

04:01

But again, that all brings us back to tone.

04:03

What is the author's attitude toward a text?

04:05

When an author's attitude is absent,

04:07

it is objective.

04:09

When an author's attitude is fully there,

04:11

it is subjective. And there's a range.

04:12

But figuring out what that tone is

04:14

is gonna really help you determine the credibility of a source.

04:17

Understood. And some of the clues I know that I think about

04:19

when I read writers.

04:21

Often it's the sources they cite.

04:24

And then that gives deep clarity

04:25

for what the author believes.

04:27

Definitely. Sources are a huge way

04:29

to tell what an author's tone is.

04:32

Really the main way you determine tone,

04:34

whether it's in literature or in an online article,

04:37

is through the word choice.

04:38

You can think of it really simply --

04:39

I think the example we give in our literature glossary online

04:42

is if you're saying, "Dave creeped across the room

04:46

and moved gently toward his office."

04:49

We get like, "Okay, something's going on here.

04:52

What's happening?"

04:53

Versus "Dave walked to his office."

04:56

We're saying the same exact thing,

04:58

but we're using different words.

05:00

So word choice, which we call diction, really affects

05:04

the tone of the piece.

05:06

All right, two words: words matter.

05:08

Tone.

05:10

[ pen writing ]

05:13

What is tone?

05:14

What is writing style?

05:17

How does the tone help you understand a source's credibility?

05:22

What is objective/subjective writing?

05:30

[ sings note ]

05:32

Yeah, it's not that.

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