Teach Tone with One Sentence

     Typical middle schooler. At home after school.

Cut to the harried mother, who has not only been to work and back, but has also picked up, dropped off, cooked dinner, and cleaned up…you’ve got the picture.

     Mother, calmly, to middle school student: I’ve asked you twice already to unload the dishwasher.

     Middle schooler in a smarmy voice: I said I will… when I’m finished.

     Mother slowly looks up at middle schooler. If smoke were capable of coming out of one’s ears, she would look like the smokestack at a plastics factory: Don’t. Speak. To me. With that tone.

     Middle schooler, sensing danger, plays dumb, shrugs innocently, attempts to sound sweet: What? I didn’t do anything. I said I’ll help you, that’s all. I’ll do it now.

      Eruption narrowly averted.

     This is likely the only connection that my students can make to “tone.”     They know that sometimes they get in trouble for it.

 

Teaching Tone

So when I teach it, I always replay this scene for them, and I love to play the mother and the child in the little act.  Then I give them a written version of the same scenario and ask them to use their inference skills to determine the tone. They also have to underline details that support their idea. They quickly figure out the word choices and short, choppy sentences develop tension. And since the reader feels the tension,  the tone must be helping to establish the mood.

        Then comes the task of teaching tone, and encouraging students to develop tone in their own narratives. Language choices are important, of course, but there’s more to it. So I give them a little challenge and I write this sentence on the board:

 

Then I ask students how many meanings can be derived from the sentence, written exactly as it is. What do you think?  Students all have the same answer: one.

Nope.

I underline the first word and ask a student to read it with emphasis. Try it.

 

What does the sentence mean now? Right. The implication is that someone else said “you” stole my red hat.

Try it again. This time, erase the underline and run the marker over the word “say” so that it appears boldface.

Interesting, right? The kids catch on right away that the speaker didn’t accuse by speaking, but may have written the accusation in a text or may have implied the accusation.

By now you really have their attention! Go through each and every word the same way. The kids love it and can’t wait to participate by saying, “With the emphasis on stole the speaker is saying the person did something else with the hat!” Or with the emphasis on red “The speaker is saying it was a different color hat!”

        It’s great fun. And when we finish, we clearly have eight different meanings. This is tone.

 

Writing with Tone in Mind

Next, we have to figure out how to establish tone in our own writing. The first ways, of course, include our sentence structure and word choices. But now the kids realize that the underlining, boldface, and quotation marks helped them understand meaning and tone.

So it must be….punctuation!

Mission accomplished 🙂

Now if I could only get my son to empty the dishwasher.

If you would like more practice on setting, tone, and mood, check out these ready-to-use resources: