Identifying Tone Activity 1 PDF

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Identifying Tone Activity1. Use a single adjective (a descriptive word) to describe the tone for each of the following article excerpts. Some possibilities include angry, happy, encouraging, silly, supportive, sad, nostalgic, concerned, etc., but there are many options. Feel free to choose from the ...

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Identifying Tone Activity 1. Use a single adjective (a descriptive word) to describe the tone for each of the following article excerpts. Some possibilities include angry, happy, encouraging, silly, supportive, sad, nostalgic, concerned, etc., but there are many options. Feel free to choose from the list above or come up with your own: a. “Yes, our children are the prey and their consumer loyalty is the prize in an escalating arms race. Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children’s predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities…The battle in which our children are engaged seems to pass beneath our radar screens, in a language we don’t understand. But we see the confusion and despair that results” (Rushkoff 384-385). Adjective: Concerned b. “I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s ‘limited’ English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect” (Tan 172). Adjective: Nostalgia c. “This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in kindergarten when other children are struggling through ‘Dick and Jane.’ If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents…I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky….I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life” (Alexie 494-495). Adjective: Prideful d. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut” (King 178). e. Adjective: Authoritative f.

“Facebook, for better or worse, is like being at a big party with all your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers. There are lots of fun, interesting people you’re happy to talk to when they stroll up. Then there are the other people, the ones who make you cringe when you see them coming. This article is about those people” (Griggs 188). Adjective: Commentative

g. “For the last month or so, I’d been spending my days crafting lush and richly imagined bits of narrative —long, lovely descriptions of characters and scenery, page after page of elegant prose in which nothing whatsoever was going on. No wonder I was bored. Though you won’t find it in

Webster’s, there’s a word to describe the kind of meticulously constructed writing that bores even its author. A ‘bore-geous’ novel is one that is packed with gorgeous, finely wrought descriptions of places and people, with entire paragraphs extolling the slope of one character’s nose, whole chapters describing another’s perambulations through a city….It’s not that the sentences aren’t wellconstructed, even lovely. They are. That’s part of the problem. Bore-geousness happens when you are writing beautifully but pointlessly” (Waldman 102-103). Adjective: Critical h. “You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind—a scene, a locale, a character, whatever—and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also, severe hypochondria” (Lamott 96). Adjective: Imaginative i.

“Even though Anne Frank was ultimately murdered, she managed, in her brief and circumscribed life, to tell the truth and bequeath the gift of hope. She searched for beauty and joy even in the harsh, frightened world of the attic in which her family hid from the Nazis. Her writing has lived on to give us all a sense of the potential largesse of the human soul, even in worst-case scenarios. It also reminds us that, behind the statistics about war and genocide, there are thousands of good people who have a responsibility to help” (Pipher 100). Adjective: Optimistic

j.

“En boca cerrada no entran moscas. ‘Flies don’t enter a closed mouth’ is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one’s mother or father. I remember one of the sins I’d recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I went to confession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa’tras, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women—I’ve never heard them applied to men…Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia” (Anzaldua 54). Adjective: Narrative

k. “So if you live in a country where forty-four million can’t read—and perhaps close to another two hundred million can read but usually don’t—well, friends, you and I are living in one very scary place.

A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID is a nation that should not be running the world—at least not until a majority of its citizens can locate Kosovo (or any other country it has bombed) on the map” (Moore 87). Adjective: disparaging

2. Read the following article excerpts. Both were written by students, one a graduate student and one an undergraduate student. Both of them have an academic tone. What traits do they have that make them sound academic? What traits do they not have that some of the more informal texts above have?

a. “A popular misconception about communication is what Michael Reddy calls ‘the conduit metaphor.’ 2 This is the belief that language is like the postal service, that it can transfer packages (ideas) from person to person without corruption of the original message: person A puts his thought or feelings into words and ‘gives’ or ‘sends’ these words to B, who ‘extracts’ or unpacks the message. The danger of this metaphor is that it leads one to believe that language is effortless. Misunderstandings are therefore extremely frustrating in that they are not supposed to occur, and if they do occur, then someone must be at fault—either the speaker did not correctly package the message or the listener erred in unpacking it, or both. However, no such exchange takes place. A more accurate description is that the speaker attempts to code ideas, feelings, and images with words. Those words are transmitted to the listener who then matches them with his/her own experiences. There is no universal codebook, so what A thinks of as ‘success’ will not necessarily match person B’s definition. Words correspond to different ideas and feelings for different people, and it can take multiple attempts before an idea has been understood satisfactorily. The more cultural differences there are between speakers, the more frequently they will have to stop and work out differences of meaning” (Akin 292). Formal Characteristics: Noncombative, Professional, Objective, Clear, Engaging Lacking Informal Characteristics: Sweeping Adjectives, Qualifiers, Broad Generalizations, Emotional and Inflammatory Language. b. “The knowledge required for democracy to function is received in general education courses. Everyone is impacted by the government, so it is important for American students to learn about democracy in the United States. In this way, people can become familiar with their rights and their duties. In Urgo’s view, the real reason behind general education courses is ‘that the United States of America is a democracy, and a democracy is a form of government that requires extensive, informed citizen participation.’ Urgo goes on to outline some of the basic democratic skills taught by general education courses, such as ‘sort[ing] and categoriz[ing]’ the knowledge that surrounds citizens on a daily basis, understanding and parsing statistical information, apprehending science and technology, and gaining a knowledge of history because ‘human beings do tend to think that whatever is happening to them now has never happened to anyone ever before.’ Indeed, general education

courses teach a number of skills which are necessary for democratic citizens. In particular, social science and humanity courses, such as history and political science, can both offer insights into government to help students play a better role in democracy. Overall, general education is essential to civic preparation.” Formal Characteristics: Non-combative, Professional, Objective, Clear, Engaging, Meaningful, Clear Insemination of Information. Lack of informal Characteristics: Clichés, SMS Spellings, Contractions, Colloquialisms.

3. Read the following excerpts from academic articles. Although each one is academic and follows the rules of academic writing, they also still have their own tones. Use a different adjective to describe the tone for each excerpt. a. “Our screen-intensive culture poses three challenges to traditional reading: distraction, consumerism, and attention-seeking behavior. Screen technologies such as the cell phone and laptop computer that are supposedly revolutionizing reading also potentially offer us greater control over our time. In practice, however, they have increased our anxiety about having too little of it by making us available anytime and anywhere. These technologies have also dramatically increased our opportunities for distraction. It is a rare Web site that presents its material without the clutter of advertisement, and a rare screen reader who isn’t lured by the siren song of an incoming e-mail’s ‘ping!’ to set aside her work to see who has written. We live in a world of continuous partial attention, one that prizes speed and brandishes the false promise of multitasking as a solution to our time management challenges. The image-driven world of the screen dominates our attention at the same time that it contributes to a kind of experience pollution that is challenging our ability to engage with the printed word” (Rosen). Adjective: Concerned b. “Will Textspeak have an effect on the language as a whole? This is unlikely. The whole point of the style is to suit a particular technology where space is at a premium: and when that constraint is dropped, abbreviated language no longer has any purpose. Its “cool” associations amongst young (or at least, young-minded) people will allow some of its idiosyncrasy to achieve a use elsewhere, and there are occasional reports of Textspeak creeping into other forms of writing, such as school essays. But these are minor trends, part of the novelty of the medium. They can be controlled as part of the task of developing in children a sense of linguistic appropriateness—in the UK, one of the basic principles behind the National curriculum in English. The genre could gain strength from its literary applications, but it is too soon to say whether these have a long-term future” (Crystal) Adjective: Commentative c. “Fortunately, breakdowns in communication are usually repairable. Misunderstandings can be explained, languages can be translated, relationships can be restored (though sometimes this takes great effort over a long period of time), rumors can be controlled, and escalation limited—all through

clear, verbal communication, i.e., talking. Despite common admonishments to ‘improve communication skills,’ the majority of people are already very sophisticated at sending and interpreting messages. The improvement most people need is more akin to a concert pianist finetuning a particular technique than to a 10-year-old student heading off for her weekly piano lesson” (Akin). Adjective: Optimistic d. And like I’m, like, really grossed out, like… The L-word. A kind of weightless backpack word that’s more and more giving us humpbacked spoken English, the lite like has been airily clogging American sentences for years now. The war against the usage—well, it wasn’t much of a war, alas—has been lost for some time, and we language-conscious losers are all trying to learn to live with the new, disjunctive babble… Like-speech, or like-orrhea, is a curious, self-contained medium. With its attendant (usually) limited vocabulary and all-thumbs expressiveness, it’s almost a kind of verbal hand-gesturing or mimicry, if not a middle-class pidgin. The kids—and more and more adults—seem locked in a kind of cawing hyperpresent tense. Many have strangely unresonant, throat-blocked, or glottal voices and use ‘up-talk,’ the tendency to end all sentences in a rising, questioning inflection. Yes, they’re mostly young people (though again, increasingly, exponentially, by no means just young people). But at times I think I’m hearing the voices of Loony Tunes and Merry Melodies creatures, each lost in rote subjectivity… Semantically, the viral like (in the new, ever insertable usage) is far less a legitimate word than a form of coping punctuation, a lame, reflexive stalling tactic for the syntactically challenged. It’s plainly what rigorous old teachers or editors might have called ‘an excrescence,’ and it’s quickly becoming the verbal security blanket and a virtual speech impediment for an entire generation—and generations to come—of Americans, from Generation X to Generation Z and beyond. It adds as much to our fair English language as barnacles do to a wharf or calculi to a healthy kidney. Apologists for this speechway—rest assured, it has multitudes of shrugging, unblinking defenders—explain that the constantly repeated word serves as a wonderfully stylish form of ironic punctuation. And here I thought it was just a terribly bad speech habit” (Grambs). Adjective: Critical...