"The council approved the budget" and "The council finally got around to approving the budget" report the same fact. The second sentence also tells you what the writer thinks of the council: finally and got around to make the members sound slow and careless, and nothing in the first sentence does. Style is the set of choices about how something is said (which words, which comparisons, what kind of sentences), and every one of those choices carries an attitude. Reading for style means noticing those choices and explaining what they make the reader think and feel about the subject.
Words carry attitude: connotation and tone
Every word has a denotation, its dictionary meaning, and most also have connotations, the feelings and associations that come with it. Thrifty, frugal, cheap and stingy all denote spending little money. Thrifty praises, cheap mocks, stingy condemns. A writer who picks one of them is telling you how to judge the person described.
Descriptive words do much of this work. Adjectives and adverbs don't only add detail; they take a side. A "towering" new apartment building and a "looming" one are the same height, but one is impressive and the other threatens. Verbs matter as much: a speaker who "admits" something has been caught, while one who "explains" it is in control. When you read a passage, mark the words that could have been neutral and weren't. Those are the writer's perspective showing.
Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject (or toward the audience), and you infer it from patterns in those choices, especially the connotations of the words. One loaded word is a hint; a cluster of them pointing the same way is a tone. Precise word choice works in the writer's favor here: a writer who calls a decision "rash" rather than "bad" tells you exactly what kind of fault they see (haste, not malice), which makes the perspective easier to follow and harder to misread.
Naming a tone takes a precise word of your own. "Positive" and "negative" describe almost nothing. Build a working vocabulary and use it: admiring, reverent, affectionate, nostalgic, wry, amused, ironic, skeptical, measured, earnest, urgent, indignant, scornful, bitter, resigned, mournful. The difference between indignant (angry at an injustice) and bitter (resentful over a personal loss) can be the difference between two answer choices.
Ironic needs its own definition, because it names a gap rather than a feeling. Irony is a mismatch between what is said and what is meant, or between what happens and what anyone expected. A writer with an ironic tone points out such a mismatch and lets the reader feel it, usually without raising the voice: a columnist who writes that a city "saved money" by closing the library and then paying to bus students to the next town's library is being ironic about the savings. Unit 8 studies how writers build an ironic perspective across a whole argument.
Comparisons: what one thing brings to another
A comparison asks you to see one thing in terms of another, and it carries the second thing's associations along. A simile makes the comparison openly with like or as; a metaphor says one thing is another; an analogy works out a comparison at length to explain or argue. The question to ask of any comparison is: what does the writer want me to carry over?
Henry David Thoreau, in Walden (1854), compares the lives of his busy, commercial readers to a voyage in bad weather:
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"
"Civilized life" would sound like an achievement on its own. Turning it into a "chopping sea" full of "quicksands" makes it a hazard, and the sailing terms (founder, make his port, dead reckoning, which means estimating a ship's position from its speed and heading when no landmark or star is visible) cast his readers as sailors barely staying afloat. The comparison argues before Thoreau states any claim: ordinary busy life is not progress but danger.
Sentences carry attitude too: syntax
Syntax is the arrangement of words into sentences: their length, their order, what is repeated, whether they are statements, questions, or exclamations. Syntax shapes how a reader experiences an idea.
- Length and contrast. A short sentence after several long ones lands hard, because the reader feels the rhythm break. Writers put their bluntest judgments there.
- Repetition. Repeating a word or a structure insists. It can sound like a chant, a complaint, or a drumbeat, depending on what is repeated.
- Lists. A long list can show abundance or overload; a list that shrinks or grows can show the writer's attitude in its shape.
- Questions and exclamations. A rhetorical question invites the reader to supply an answer the writer thinks is obvious; an exclamation shows feeling the writer chooses not to hide.
Here is the passage in Walden just before the sea comparison:
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"
The first sentence is short and flat, a verdict. "Frittered," which means wasted in small bits, carries contempt for the "detail" it names. The tripled "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" is an exclamation and a repetition at once: it sounds like a man raising his voice. Then the numbers shrink across the last sentence, from "a hundred or a thousand" and "a million" down to "two or three," "half a dozen," and finally a single thumbnail, so the sentence acts out the simplifying it demands. The tone is impatient and mocking toward the reader's habits, but the joke about counting on ten toes "in extreme cases" keeps it humorous rather than harsh. Unit 7 studies sentence structure in more detail, including how clauses show relationships between ideas.
Worked examples
Three local news sites described the same event. For each, identify the words that carry attitude and the tone they create.
- About two hundred residents attended Tuesday's council meeting to oppose the closing of the Hartwell ice rink.
- A crowd of nearly two hundred residents packed Tuesday's council meeting, pleading with members to save the Hartwell ice rink.
- A mob of some two hundred rink devotees descended on Tuesday's council meeting, demanding that members reverse the closing.
Show solution
- Neutral. "Attended" and "oppose" are plain, with no judgment about the residents or the rink. This is the baseline the other two depart from.
- Sympathetic to the residents. "Packed" shows numbers and energy; "pleading" casts residents as earnest and somewhat powerless; "save" makes the rink something valuable under threat. The tone is sympathetic, even urgent.
- Dismissive, even hostile. "Mob" suggests disorder, "devotees" makes residents sound fanatical about a mere hobby, "descended on" suggests an invasion, and "demanding" sounds aggressive where version 2 heard pleading. The tone is scornful.
Every version reports roughly two hundred people at a meeting about the rink. The attitude lives entirely in the word choices, which is why a tone answer has to rest on specific words.
The following passage is original, written for this lesson. Its speaker is a retired ferry captain in the early 1900s, writing in a city magazine shortly after a bridge has opened across the river.
For thirty-one years I carried this city across its river, four crossings an hour, and in all that time I never once heard a passenger call the trip beautiful. They called it late. They called it cold, crowded, and a disgrace to a modern city. A councilman once told me, on my own deck, that the ferry was the last relic of the Middle Ages still collecting fares.
Now there is a bridge, and it is a handsome one: steel painted the gray of a winter morning, carriages and motorcars across in four minutes flat. I rode it on the first day. It was efficient, dry, and entirely without incident, and I could not see the water.
I do not begrudge the city its bridge. But I notice that the people who cursed my boat now write letters to the newspaper remembering the gulls, the spray, the long blue look up the river at sunset. It seems a ferry becomes beautiful at the exact moment it stops running.
Question 1. The repetition of "They called it" in the first paragraph primarily serves to
- (A) emphasize how steadily and how long the captain heard complaints
- (B) suggest that the passengers lacked the vocabulary to describe the trip
- (C) show that the captain shared his passengers' low opinion of the ferry
- (D) introduce the councilman as the most important critic
Question 2. In the second paragraph, the description of the bridge's first crossing as "efficient, dry, and entirely without incident" suggests that the captain regards the bridge with
- (A) unqualified admiration
- (B) bitter resentment
- (C) respect mixed with a sense of something lost
- (D) professional curiosity about its construction
Question 3. The tone of the final paragraph is best described as
- (A) gently ironic
- (B) indignant
- (C) mournful
- (D) nostalgic
Show solution
1. (A). The short repeated sentences land one after another the way complaints did, for thirty-one years. The repetition makes the reader feel the steadiness of the criticism. (C) is wrong because the passage's later irony depends on the captain not sharing the view. (B) misreads the repetition as a comment on the passengers' vocabulary; (D) ignores that the councilman comes after the repetition and is one more example of it.
2. (C). "Handsome" and "efficient" grant the bridge real merit, so (B) is too strong. But "entirely without incident" is faint praise, the kind a man who spent decades among spray and gulls would give, and the short final clause "and I could not see the water" names what was lost. That mix rules out (A). Nothing in the description concerns how the bridge was built, so (D) fails.
3. (A). The captain points out that the same people who called the ferry a disgrace now remember it fondly, and his last sentence states the contradiction with a straight face: the ferry became beautiful "at the exact moment it stops running." Pointing out, mildly and without anger, the mismatch between what people said of the ferry while it ran and what they say now is irony: the boat they called a disgrace is praised only once it is gone. (B) is ruled out by "I do not begrudge the city its bridge." (C) is too heavy for a writer who is amused. (D) is the trap: the letter writers are nostalgic, but the question asks for the captain's attitude, and he is commenting on their nostalgia, not sharing it.
Using the two Walden excerpts quoted above, write a body paragraph that explains how Thoreau's style conveys his attitude toward the way his readers live. Context: Thoreau wrote Walden after living for two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts. He addressed the book largely to New Englanders like his Concord neighbors: farmers, shopkeepers and laborers busy earning a living.
Show solution
Model paragraph.
Thoreau mocks his readers' crowded lives so that his call to simplify will sound like common sense rather than sacrifice. He begins with a verdict in a single short sentence, "Our life is frittered away by detail," where "frittered" makes the reader's daily business sound like money dribbled away in coins. Rather than argue the point, he jokes that an honest man needs only his ten fingers to count, adding "his ten toes" only "in extreme cases"; the joke shrinks the reader's ledgers to a child's arithmetic and makes complicated accounts look faintly ridiculous. His tripled exclamation, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!", then raises the voice of the passage, and his final sentence acts out the cure by moving from "a million" down to "half a dozen" and finally a "thumb nail." When he turns to metaphor, the mockery becomes a warning: calling "civilized life" a "chopping sea" full of "quicksands" tells shopkeepers and farmers who think of themselves as prudent that their careful lives are the risky ones, steered "by dead reckoning" with no landmark in sight. For readers whose livelihoods depended on careful accounting, the mix of humor and alarm makes simplicity look both less frightening and more urgent than they had assumed.
Why it earns credit. The first sentence makes a claim about what the style does for this audience, not a list of devices. Every quotation is followed by commentary that names the effect of a specific word or structure ("frittered," the shrinking numbers, the sailing terms). The paragraph ties the effects to Thoreau's readers, which is what turns a description of devices into analysis. A paragraph that said "Thoreau uses repetition, a metaphor, and diction to persuade his audience" would identify choices without explaining any of them, and that earns little.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Multiple-choice questions on style ask about tone ("the tone of the passage is best described as"), the effect of a word or phrase ("the phrase ... suggests that the author regards ... with"), the function of a comparison, and the effect of repetition or a short sentence. Some ask how the author is characterized ("the author is best described as"), which depends on the same reading of word choice. In the rhetorical analysis essay, style choices are among the richest evidence you can analyze, as long as each one is explained in relation to the writer's purpose and audience, the situation you learned to describe in Topic 1.1.
Check yourself
Question 1
A restaurant review says the chef "has a weakness for butter that borders on the devotional." The reviewer's attitude toward the chef is best described as
- A
affectionately amused
- B
harshly critical
- C
coldly neutral
- D
reverent
Show answer
A
"Weakness" names a fault, but "borders on the devotional" exaggerates it playfully, so the reviewer teases rather than condemns. D is the trap: "devotional" is the chef's attitude toward butter, not the reviewer's attitude toward the chef.
- A
Question 2
Two editorials describe the same new city law. One calls it "a firm response to a growing problem"; the other calls it "a heavy-handed crackdown." Explain how the word choices create different attitudes toward the law.
Show answer
"Firm" connotes strength used properly and "response" suggests the law answers a real need, so the first editorial approves of the law. "Heavy-handed" connotes clumsy, excessive force and "crackdown" suggests punishment aimed at people, so the second editorial disapproves of the law as an overreaction.
Both phrases denote a strict law. The attitude comes from connotation: words that suggest proportion and need versus words that suggest excess and aggression.
Question 3
A writer describes a new highway interchange as "a concrete octopus, its gray arms reaching into every neighborhood on the east side." What does the comparison most suggest about the writer's view?
- A
The interchange is an impressive feat of engineering.
- B
The interchange is intrusive and spreads into places it does not belong.
- C
The interchange connects the east side's neighborhoods to one another.
- D
The interchange will be replaced by something more natural.
Show answer
B
An octopus "reaching" into neighborhoods carries associations of a creature grasping at things, so the comparison casts the interchange as invasive. C is tempting because the arms do reach many neighborhoods, but the comparison's associations are threatening, not connective.
- A
Question 4
After four long sentences describing a town's preparations for a parade that was then canceled for rain, a writer ends a paragraph with "It rained." What is the effect of this short sentence?
Show answer
Its abruptness breaks the rhythm built by the long sentences, so the reader feels the deflation of all those preparations ending in an instant. The flat statement also gives the moment a dry, understated humor.
A short sentence after long ones lands hard because it interrupts the pattern. Here the syntax mirrors the event: elaborate buildup, sudden collapse.