"The school was old" and "The cloakroom roof had leaked since the parents of my students sat beneath it" report the same fact. The second sentence also tells you how long the writer has been there, that she knows the families, and that she has made her peace with the leak. Style is the set of choices about how something is said (which words, which details, which comparisons, what kind of sentences), and on the exam you read it for two things: what it reveals about the writer's attitude, and what it does to the audience. Unit 2 asks you to connect style to that audience, because writers choose their words to reach particular readers' feelings and values.
Connotation: words that carry a judgment
Every word has a denotation, its dictionary meaning, and many carry a connotation, the feelings and judgments that come attached. Thrifty and stingy denote the same habit of spending little; one praises it and the other condemns it. Crowd, gathering and mob can all describe two hundred people in one room. Insisted, urged and nagged can all describe the same request. When a writer had a neutral word available and chose a loaded one, that choice is evidence of attitude.
Connotation is also how writers reach an audience's values. Readers who prize thrift hear "investment" where others hear "expense." Readers who prize tradition warm to "heritage" and bristle at "outdated." A writer who knows the audience picks the word whose connotation fits what they already care about, so the claim feels like an expression of their own values. When you analyze a word choice, ask two questions: what judgment does this word carry that a plainer word would not, and why would that judgment work on these readers?
Details, images, and comparisons
No writer can include everything, so the details that appear were selected, and the selection shows what the writer wants you to notice. A news story about a factory closing that mentions the owner's new yacht and one that mentions the owner's forty years of unbroken payrolls may both be accurate. They are not neutral.
Imagery is language that appeals to the senses: what a scene looks, sounds, smells, feels or tastes like. Sensory detail puts the reader inside an experience instead of reporting it from outside, which is why it is the main tool of an appeal to emotion. "Classrooms were cold" informs. "Students wrote in their mittens" makes the reader feel the cold and, depending on context, pity the students, admire them, or laugh with the writer.
Figurative comparisons carry a judgment from one thing to another. A simile compares with like or as ("a dipper worn thin as a leaf"), a metaphor states the comparison outright ("the new highway is a wall through the middle of town"), and personification gives human qualities to something that isn't human ("the old furnace sulked all winter"). Topic 2.5 treated comparisons as steps in reasoning. In style questions, the focus is what the comparison makes the reader feel about the subject: a highway called a wall is something that divides and imprisons, whatever its engineers intended.
Sentence shape is part of style too. A long list of details piles up into an impression of abundance, burden, or chaos. A remark set off by dashes or parentheses can work as an aside, where the writer's real opinion slips in. A short sentence after several long ones lands with extra weight. Unit 7 studies sentences in depth; for now, notice when the shape of a sentence is doing something the words alone don't.
Tone: the attitude all of it adds up to
Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject (and sometimes toward the audience), as the style reveals it. You don't find tone in a single word. You infer it from the pattern of diction, detail and comparison, the way you infer a speaker's mood from both the words and how they're said.
Describe tone precisely. "Positive" and "negative" are directions, not tones. Useful tone words are specific: admiring, affectionate, nostalgic, wry, amused, ironic, skeptical, earnest, indignant, exasperated, resigned, reverent, defiant, mocking, measured, urgent. Many AP passages have a mixed tone, so a two-part description is often most accurate: "affectionate but unsentimental," "respectful with an edge of skepticism." Exam answer choices reflect this, and the right choice is often the one whose two halves are both true of the passage.
A few habits make tone questions easier.
- Read the words, not the topic. A passage about a funeral can be warm and funny; a passage about a parade can be bitter. The subject sets no tone; the style does.
- Watch for irony, where the literal words say one thing and the writer means another. A writer who calls a dreadful plan "handsome" may be praising it or quietly mocking it, and the surrounding details decide which.
- Distrust extreme choices. Choices such as furious, bitter, or ecstatic are right only when the passage is unmistakably that intense. Before you pick one, find the words in the passage that are that intense; if you can't, the choice overstates.
Unit 5 returns to tone, especially to how and why it shifts within a passage.
Worked examples
Two local news reports describe the same city council meeting.
A. Nearly two hundred residents filled the council chamber Tuesday night, many holding leashes and hand-lettered signs, to urge members to keep the Riverside dog park open.
B. A crowd of roughly two hundred dog owners swarmed the council chamber Tuesday night, waving signs and interrupting speakers, in a bid to keep the Riverside dog park.
Describe each reporter's attitude toward the people at the meeting, and point to the words that show it.
Show solution
Report A is sympathetic. "Residents" presents the attendees as citizens with a stake in the town, "filled" is neutral about their numbers, and the details chosen (leashes, hand-lettered signs) suggest ordinary people who made the effort themselves. "Urge" is a respectful verb for a request.
Report B is disapproving. "Dog owners" shrinks the group to a special interest, "swarmed" compares them to insects, "waving" signs and "interrupting speakers" select for disorder, and "in a bid to" frames their goal as a maneuver rather than a request.
Both reports could be accurate in every fact. The attitude lives entirely in the choice of words and details, which is what a style question is asking you to see.
A mayor spoke at the reopening of the town library, which a flood had closed eight months earlier. Part of her speech:
Eight months ago the water stood four feet deep in this room. It soaked the atlases, floated the card catalog off its feet, and left a brown line along this wall that some of you asked us to keep. We kept it. Now look above it, at the shelves.
Write two or three sentences of rhetorical analysis explaining how her style serves her purpose with this audience.
Show solution
The mayor makes the flood physical for an audience standing in the same room, choosing images (atlases soaked through, water that "floated the card catalog off its feet") that turn a disaster into damage to familiar objects her listeners once used. By keeping the "brown line" and pointing to it, she lets the flood's height become a measuring mark, so the short command "Now look above it, at the shelves" moves her listeners' eyes, and their feelings, from loss to recovery in a single gesture. Her style asks residents to see the reopening as something they did together, which suits a speech meant to thank the town that rebuilt the library.
Why it works. Each sentence names a specific choice, quotes it, and explains its effect on these listeners. It never says only "she uses imagery." The commentary also notices that "We kept it" and "Now look above it" are short sentences after a long one, and explains what that turn accomplishes.
The following passage was written for this lesson. Its speaker is a woman in the early 1920s who has taught for thirty years in a one-room country school that her county is about to close.
The county superintendent tells me that the new consolidated school in Harlow will have a separate room for every grade, a furnace that needs no tending, and a motor wagon to carry the children there and back. I believe him. I have seen the plans, and they are handsome plans, drawn by a man who has evidently never had to thaw an inkwell.
Our school has one room. In January the stove at the front roasts the little ones on the first bench while the big boys at the back write in their mittens. The roof over the cloakroom has leaked since the Collier boys' father sat beneath it, and the water bucket, which the older girls fill at the Pruitt spring each morning, has a dipper worn thin as a leaf by forty years of mouths.
I would not keep a child in that room one winter longer for the sake of my own fondness. But I will say this for it. When the big boys finished their sums, they heard the little ones recite, and more than one of them learned to read properly by listening to a six-year-old stumble through the primer. No plan I have seen has a place for that.
Question 1. The writer's attitude toward the plans for the new school is best described as
- (A) admiring approval of their practical design
- (B) scornful rejection of the superintendent's judgment
- (C) acceptance mixed with wry doubt about what the planners understand
- (D) anxious uncertainty about whether the school will be built
Question 2. The details in the second paragraph (the stove, the mittens, the leaking roof, the worn dipper) primarily serve to
- (A) argue that the county should repair the old school instead of closing it
- (B) acknowledge the old school's real hardships while conveying the writer's affection for it
- (C) blame the families of the district for neglecting the building
- (D) show that the children were unhappy in the one-room school
Question 3. The phrase "drawn by a man who has evidently never had to thaw an inkwell" (first paragraph) chiefly suggests that
- (A) the planner lacks firsthand experience of daily life in a country school
- (B) the new school will not supply its students with ink
- (C) the writer suspects the plans have been drawn dishonestly
- (D) the superintendent has hidden the plans' flaws from the writer
Show solution
1. (C). She accepts the new school ("I believe him"; she would not keep a child in the old room "one winter longer"), so (B) is too hostile. But "handsome plans" followed by a planner who has "never had to thaw an inkwell" is gently ironic: the praise is real and limited, and the last paragraph names something the plans leave out. (A) catches the reader who takes "handsome" at face value. (D) has no support: she has seen the plans and believes the superintendent.
2. (B). The details are hardships (children roasted or freezing, a leaking roof), but the way they are described shows long familiarity and fondness: she knows which family's father sat under the leak and how long the dipper has been used. A reader of her day who had attended such a school, as many had, would recognize the scene with the same mix of discomfort and affection. (A) contradicts her acceptance of the closing. (C) and (D) find blame and unhappiness the words don't show; "roasts" and "write in their mittens" are told with humor, not complaint.
3. (A). Thawing an inkwell was an ordinary chore in an unheated country schoolroom, so a man who never did it has not lived the life the plans are meant to improve. That is why the last paragraph's point, that the plans have no place for older children learning from younger ones, follows naturally. (B) reads the image literally. (C) and (D) make the irony harsher than the passage allows: she questions the planner's experience, not his honesty.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Reading questions on style use stems such as "The writer's attitude toward ... is best described as," "The tone of the passage can best be described as," "The images in the second paragraph primarily serve to," "The phrase ... chiefly suggests," and "The writer most likely intends the reader to find the remark ... ." In the rhetorical analysis essay, style is where much of the commentary happens: essays at the top of the evidence-and-commentary scale quote specific words and images and explain how they work on the audience the prompt describes, while essays that list devices without explaining them score lower however many devices they find.
Check yourself
Question 1
A columnist writes that the new city manager "has been tinkering with the bus schedule since March." Compared with "has been revising the bus schedule since March," what does "tinkering" suggest?
- A
That the manager has made careful, expert improvements
- B
That the manager's changes are small, aimless, and perhaps unnecessary
- C
That the bus schedule is mechanically complicated
- D
That the columnist has no opinion about the changes
Show answer
B
Both verbs denote making changes; "tinkering" connotes fiddling without a clear plan, which signals the columnist's skepticism. Choice A reverses the connotation, and C takes the mechanical sense of the word literally.
- A
Question 2
A writer describes leaving her childhood home: "I packed the chipped blue mugs, the warped cutting board, the radio that only found one station, and I could not have told you why I wanted any of them." Which best describes the tone?
- A
Bitter resentment of her family's poverty
- B
Tender attachment, aware of its own lack of reason
- C
Cheerful indifference to the move
- D
Detached, objective reporting
Show answer
B
The details are worn, nearly useless objects, and she keeps them anyway while admitting she can't explain why: affection that knows it isn't practical. Choice D fails because the selection of objects and the closing admission are both personal, not neutral.
- A
Question 3
In a letter opposing a plan to pave a schoolyard, a parent calls the proposed lot "a hot gray lid over the only grass our children touch all day." Explain how the metaphor works on the parent's audience of other parents.
Show answer
Calling the pavement a "lid" makes it something that covers and shuts in, so the lot sounds like a seal over something alive, and "hot gray" adds the sensory discomfort of asphalt in the sun. Paired with "the only grass our children touch all day," it appeals to parents' protectiveness, turning a parking decision into a loss for their own children.
Analyzing a metaphor means saying what judgment it carries to the subject and why that judgment works on this audience. Naming it as a metaphor earns nothing by itself.
Question 4
Two profiles of the same retiring baseball coach both include accurate facts. One mentions his 412 career wins and three league titles; the other mentions that he drove players home after late games and kept a box of spare cleats in his trunk. What does the second writer's selection of details most clearly suggest?
- A
The second writer considers the coach's record unimpressive.
- B
The second writer values the coach's care for his players more than his record.
- C
The second writer did not have access to the coach's statistics.
- D
The second writer is criticizing the coach for spending money on players.
Show answer
B
Selection of detail is a style choice that reveals what a writer wants readers to notice. Choice A overreads: leaving the record out shows where the writer's emphasis lies, not contempt for the record.
- A