Tone

“Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice!” Most of us know what tone refers to in this context. It’s what many parents have said and most of us have thought.

What does it mean, though, when it comes to writing? As an editor, I will sometimes read something and conclude that the tone is wrong for the audience and purpose we have in mind. It’s something of a gut feeling that prompts me to look more closely.

Tone is related to the mood the words communicate (spoken or written). When speaking, we can use the inflection of our voices, body language, pauses, and a variety of other techniques to communicate our meaning. Most of us are so skilled at this (especially in our heart language) that we can say one thing but communicate something completely different. We can say “I’m sorry” while communicating that we are not sorry at all.

Conveying your true intention

When it comes to writing, it takes more work to convey tone well. We live in the age of emailing and texting, and we have probably all received messages and wondered what was really meant. Texting often benefits from emoji, but even then, messages can be confusing. In informal writing, people also use techniques like exclamation marks, ellipses, dashes, italics, bolding, and all caps to convey tone. Quotation marks can be used to indicate irony, sarcasm, or that an author is using a word in a non-standard sense.

In more formal writing, it’s best to use word choice as well as sentence structure and length to convey our tone and meaning.

How does your reader feel?

A key question to consider is this: How do you want your reader to feel when they read your writing?

This is where having someone else read your work can be very useful. Something you’ve written might not sound judgemental to you, but it might make your readers feel unreasonably guilty. Overexaggeration can grate on your reader’s ears. Sometimes a writer piles on too many descriptors to get us to feel sorry for the person, and that can make a true story sound contrived or unrealistic. If it’s fiction, it can sound absurd.

Try this exercise

There are many different tones you can find in writing: formal, informal, optimistic, joyful, sad, discouraging, encouraging, sincere, critical, genuine, fearful, brave, shocking, nervous, calm, hopeful, humorous, and serious.

To help you think about this topic, try reading the following quote by an Australian missionary in Nepal. What tones do you feel?

In my season right now, I am sitting halfway up our hill on the Dhulikhel ridge. As I have been writing this, July has turned to August. But August in Nepal also means rain. This year’s monsoon has seemed endless. It’s our seventh . . . or have I already said that? Right now, I am watching the water pour down in streams across the windowpanes. It is splashing into the mud beneath the swings and making a thudding noise on the roof of the chicken coop. It is bouncing off the banana leaves and landing on the beans below them. Just as inside the house, the boys are bouncing off the walls and landing on their recently-constructed Lego castle.

I deal with the casualties and then return my gaze to the view out the window. The black clouds have absorbed the sky, the weight of them seems to defy gravity. Even the mud houses that sit precariously on the ridge have been blackened into oblivion. My ears pick up the thunder in the distance. It reminds me that the season isn’t done yet. The physical seasons don’t tend to move on until they are ready to. [Naomi Reed, My Seventh Monsoon (Ark House Press, 2007), 191–192.]

It makes me feel a little hopeless and frustrated, but the thought that seasons move on makes me feel hopeful and want to read on to hear how she coped with this long monsoon season (and the bouncy boys). The tone is also personal; we could be sitting across the table from the author telling her story. What does it make you feel?

Try this same exercise with another passage, maybe the closest book at hand or revisiting an author you love. See if it helps you better shape the tone of your writing to serve your audience and purpose.