Authors have a lot of style choices to make when creating a text. One of these choices is tone, which has a big impact on the presentation of meaning and purpose. Knowing how tone influences a text will help you find the author's purpose and understand the reading as a whole.
Review this presentation on identifying word choices and their effect on a text.
When writing, authors make specific decisions about the words they use. These words may convey information, provide entertainment, or make connections.
As readers, it is important that we understand why words were chosen to better comprehend the purpose of a text.
Word choices also influence tone, or the attitude or emotion of the author. Tone may be professional, academic, humorous, sad, etc.
We'll review each of these in this presentation
If a writer chooses to adhere to these seven points, they are being precise in their writing.
A writer can choose to intentionally avoid these, however, and make a text unclear on purpose. Sometimes a writer is misleading and may provide unclear or hard-to-follow (incoherent) wording to confuse a reader. This may also be done if the writer is aiming for a humorous tone and trying to make the reader laugh.
In most writing, authors will aim for specificity in a text. This means that use their words to convey narrower meaning. Typically, more specific wording will make it easier for the reader to understand the text's purpose.
Depending on the tone the writer is trying to achieve, they may aim for varying level of specificity throughout a text. Keep an eye on how specific the words are in a reading to better understand the purpose, or why the author wrote it.
It's not uncommon to hear the word "literal" used incorrectly in conversation. Literal means the exact meaning of a word or phrase. Figurative, on the other hand, means an expressed meaning that move away from literal.
If someone says, "That ride was amazing! My heart was literally beating out of my chest!" If this was literally true, that person would need a doctor immediately!
Here are two examples of literal and figurative language:
We see a lot of literal language in non-fiction writing when an author has a professional tone.
Figurative language often appears when the author is trying to convey an emotional tone.
Source: Saylor Academy
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