Week 18: Week 18 — Tone, Voice, and Diction
Week of Mon, Jan 18 · week closes Sun, Jan 24
This week's items
Exact due times are in Canvas. Late work accepted at 10% per day; assessed work not accepted late. Vocabulary quizzes are unannounced and cannot be made up.
Know these cold
- Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject — inferred from diction, syntax, and the details selected. Tone is not stated; it is constructed through choices.
- Voice is the distinctive quality that makes a piece identifiable as the work of one writer — a consistent combination of diction, syntax, rhythm, and perspective across their work.
- Register is the level of formality in language, shaped by the writer's relationship to the audience and the occasion: formal, semi-formal, informal, and colloquial.
- Connotation determines tone: the same event described in words with positive versus negative connotations produces entirely different tones.
- Irony is a gap between surface meaning and intended meaning, or between appearance and reality — it requires the reader to perceive two layers simultaneously.
- Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony used to mock or criticize — it depends on the reader recognizing that the speaker does not mean what they literally say.
- A sardonic tone is bitter and cynically humorous; a wry tone is dryly amusing and slightly ironic without venom. Both require precision in word choice to distinguish from sarcasm.
- Latinate diction — words derived from Latin and French roots — tends to feel formal, abstract, and distancing. Anglo-Saxon diction tends to feel direct, concrete, and immediate.
- Sentence rhythm contributes to voice: a writer who consistently uses short, declarative sentences has a different voice from one who builds long, subordinated structures.
- Tonal consistency: shifting tone without a rhetorical purpose disorients the reader. A deliberate tonal shift should signal a shift in the writer's relationship to the subject.
Meerk's quiz — open the Week 18 gate
10 questions, no time limit. 85% on your first attempt in a 24-hour window opens the gate. Retakes inside the window are practice — they help you learn, they don't count. Work alone; the point is to know it, not to have seen it.
Dinner Table Question
Ask at home: If two writers describe the same event, what makes their voices different?
En español: Si dos escritores describen el mismo evento, ¿qué hace que sus voces sean diferentes?