Tone, Mood, and Audience
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When thinking about proper diction, an author should consider three main categories: tone, mood, and audience.
Audience refers to who will be reading the work. Authors tend to write to a particular audience, whether kids, or young adults, or specialist within a field. The audience can affect the mood and tone of the writing because different audiences have different expectations.
Tone refers to the author’s attitude—how they feel about their subject and their readers. It expresses something of the author’s persona, the aspects of their personality they wish to show to their readers. For example, are they being funny or serious? Are they writing with fondness or with derision?
Mood refers to the overall atmosphere or feeling of a piece of writing. It is often closely related to tone, because the author’s attitude influences the overall feeling of a text. It’s difficult, for instance, to take a jovial tone if the overall mood of the piece ought to be somber, or vice versa. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë would be far less effective as a gothic text if its spooky atmosphere was interrupted by witty, sarcastic commentary in the style of Jane Austen.
Take, for example, this quote from Wuthering Heights:
This passage displays heightened emotions and dark themes through the use of words like “ghost,” “haunt,” and “abyss,” among others. Consider how much less effective this passage would be if the narration sounded like Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Using the appropriate kind of descriptive words, including imagery, or vivid language used to paint a mental picture, can convey mood and tone by helping readers get a clearer sense of what they’re reading about and how the author thinks and feels about the subject, and thus what they’re supposed to think and feel.
Diction can help authors make audiences feel a certain way, like in the example above. Similarly, different styles of diction may be targeted at different audiences—there’s a good reason Wuthering Heights is aimed at teenagers and adults rather than young children, for instance. In addition to the content of the text, the elevated and somewhat antiquated diction would make it very challenging for younger audiences to understand. Conversely, a paper aimed at an audience of academic experts would probably be expected to use more jargon and complicated diction.
Take, for example, this simplistic description of Pluto’s orbit from Astronomy.com’s Astronomy for Kids educational resource:
Compare this language with the highly technical language used in an Encyclopedia Britannica article on Pluto:
These texts, while essentially saying the same thing, are using wildly different language due to the disparity between their intended audiences.