To remember mood and tone you must remember that reading
someone's work is a relationship between your feelings and the author's feelings. It's
really between two people and how they each feel about the body of work, short story,
novel, etc.
Mood is the way you react or feel about what
you're reading. If you're reading a short story by Stephen King and the story is
describing a dark bleak world with sudden attacks the mood (how you are expected to
feel) would be uncomfortable, spooked, unsettled, etc. If you are reading a novel about
the return of the black plague and it's very descriptive the mood would be uneasy,
queasy, paranoid, worried, or however you would react reading about something like
that.
Tone is the attitude, or how the author feels about
his/her subject matter. The tone can be determined by examining the choice of words the
author uses. This will help determine tone. For example, If I were to be a Nazi
enthusiast (purely hypothetical btw), you would expect harsh, negative language when
describing Jewish people. That would be expected of a neo-Nazi blogger or author.
Another example would be if I were a writer (which I am) and were to write a short story
about Nazis I would use language such as 'cruel' 'excessive' 'genocide' 'hate' 'murder'
all indicating that I, as the author detest the Nazi, or neo-Nazi ideology. That is the
tone of my work if I were the author.
I teach a simplified
version to my high schooler students:
mood is how you feel
about the work.
tone is how the autor feels about the
subject he is writing about.
YOU sounds more like MOOD. So
mood means 'you'
tone therefore is author (a little trick
if you forget which is
which)
you-mood
author-tone.
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