1. DIDLS: The Key to TONE
Salvatore 2018

2. Tone is defined as the writer’s or speaker’s attitude toward a specific subject.
An appreciation of word choice, details, imagery, and language all contribute to the understanding of tone.
What is tone?

3. Diction Diction is the connotation of the word choice.
Questions to consider:
What words does the author choose?
Why did the author choose that particular word?
What are the connotations of that word choice?
Example: Think about the different connotations for the synonyms of “laugh”
Guffaw, chuckle, giggle, snicker, roar
Diction

4. Imagery is descriptive language that appeals to understanding through the senses.
Questions to consider:
What images does the author use?
What does he/she focus on in a sensory way?
Example: The eerie silence was shattered by her piercing scream.
Imagery

5. Details are facts that the author chooses to include in a piece.
Questions to consider:
What details does the author include?
What do they imply?
What are the connotations of that detail?
Note: the speaker’s perspective shapes what details are given and which are not.
Details

6. Any figurative language used in a piece (ex
Any figurative language used in a piece (ex. Simile, metaphor, personification, etc.)
Questions to consider:
How does this affect the tone of the piece?
What are the connotations?
Example: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Language

7. Sentence Structure How structure affects the reader’s attitude.
Questions to consider:
What are the sentences like?
Are they simple or complex?
Are they choppy or flowing sentences?
What is the rhyme scheme?
Short sentences are punchy and intense. Long sentences are distancing, reflective, and more abstract.
Sentence Structure

8. A speaker’s attitude can shift on a topic, or an author might have one attitude toward the audience and another toward the subject.
Indicators of shift change include…
Key words (but, yet, however)
Punctuation (dashes, periods, colons)
New paragraphs
Change in sentence length
Shifts in Tone

9. Miss Lottie’s marigolds were perhaps the strangest part the lot
Miss Lottie’s marigolds were perhaps the strangest part the lot. Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard. Beyond the dusty brown yard, in front of the sorry gray house, rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate and sun-golden. The old witch-woman worked on them all summer, every summer, down on her creaky knees, weeding and cultivating and arranging, while the house crumbled. For some reason, we children hated those marigolds. They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand. There was something with which the old woman destroyed the weeds that intimidated us. It should have been a comical sight—the old woman with the man’s hat on her cropped white head, leaning over the bright mounds, her big backside in the air—but it wasn’t comical, it was something we could not name. Actually, I think it was the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to try it.
Eugenia W. Collier, Marigolds
Practice! 