DIDLS: The Tone Acronym

When establishing or determining the tone of a piece of writing. readers and writers should consider five key elements.

Diction - the connotations, or associations, of word choices

Different words for the same thing often suggest different attitudes toward that thing.  For example, what is the difference between happy and content?  How about happy and ecstatic?

Imagery - vivid appeals to understanding through the five senses

The images a speaker/writer chooses to present suggest her attitude toward her subject.  For example, if a narrator visiting a farm describes the awful smells rather than the beautiful countryside, her description would tell us something about her attitude.

Details - specifics that are included or omitted

Details are most commonly the facts given my the author or speaker as support for the attitude or tone.  The speaker's perspective shapes what details are given.  For example, how might child's report of details from a car accident differ from that of a parent or a police officer?

Language - 1) the overall use of language such as formal, colloquial, clinical, or casual, etc., or the use of dialect or jargon

An ambassador speaks differently than a teenager who speaks differently than a farmer who speaks differently than a soldier from the Civil War.  The type of overall language contributes to the tone.

Language - 2) figures of speech such as metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, etc.

A figure of speech names on thing in terms of another.  The way in which a speaker compares something to something else can tell us something about the speaker's attitude.  For example, if I compare her black hair to soot or to onyx, the connotation would be very different.

Syntax - sentence structure and the use of punctuation

Long, flowing sentences give the reader a different feeling than short, choppy sentences.  If the narrator uses awkward sentence structures or grammatical errors, we might think that he is uneducated.  The use of dashes, italics, run on sentences, short sentences, capital letters, etc., all contribute to how we read and process the information in a passage.