The attitude a piece of writing takes toward its subject and audience is its tone. Tone can be serious, ironic, playful, detached, urgent, or melancholic. It is conveyed through word choice, sentence structure, imagery, and the overall stance the narrator or speaker adopts. Two accounts of the same event can feel entirely different because of differences in tone.

Readers sense tone quickly, often before they can name it. A formal tone creates distance; a conversational tone invites intimacy. Irony depends on a gap between the literal meaning of the words and the attitude behind them. Inconsistency of tone can confuse or amuse, depending on whether it is intentional.

Writers control tone deliberately when they revise, listening for the emotional and intellectual coloring of each passage. In literature, tone is one of the principal means by which an author shapes the reader’s experience. Recognizing tone is therefore a fundamental skill of attentive reading.