The Use of Tone in Nonfiction Types of Writing - Essay Example

The Use of Tone in Nonfiction Essays Tone refers to the attitude towards the or prospective readers of astory. Authors reveal the tone by selecting appropriate words to include in the story and style of presentation. A writer might choose to employ regular tone throughout the story or vary the tone to express the changing subjects in the story. English literature represents tone by the use of diction, imagery, language selection and sentence structure. Katie Haegele applied the various aspects of tone to portray a humorous and descriptive tone in her article Second Home. Haegele selectively used the first person perspective to enhance the narration and impart more humor in the story. The Words Used Are Also Humorous In Their Respect. The story is descriptive as it narrates the encounters Katie underwent to refurbish her dollhouse. The author carefully selected words that can form an image of a relative size in the reader’s mind. The description creates a vivid world for the reader. The reader consequently becomes immersed in thoughts and mind to reading task. The story ceases to become a book and acts as a movie in the reader’s mind to which the reader can feel like he is one of the actors. The author describes her sister’s doll with additional fittings such as the staircase and kitchen sink with exposed pipes (Haegele 1). The reader has background knowledge of what a real room with these details might resemble. The imagery use compels the readers to create a small house with such features in their minds. Katie carefully selects her words to enhance the humorous tone in the story. The use of specific words to bring humor in the story is evident and dominates the story. The sense of humor comes as a result of the reader depicted to imagine in a similar manner to a child. The reader thinks like a child fantasizing about being in control of a house with such features. We encounter a use of imagery to enhance the humor of the story when the writer describes the parrots on the wallpaper as looking like ancient predators (Haegele 1). The reader has an idea of how the prehistoric predators looked like from the movies. The description compels the reader to form an image of a huge parrot, the size of a predator. The wallpaper looks humorously terrifying. The author then describes how she decorated the dollhouse’s bathroom with teensy seashells. The reader relates the picture with that in the home bathroom setting and realizes a child’s naivety. The reader embraces and creates the image of a child’s perspective and reasoning. The author, furthermore, enhances the tone of the story when she describes the shopping accessories catalog. She describes the wooden racks to be as thin as toothpicks (Haegele 1). The description increases the humor as well when the reader forms the image of racks composed of parts as thin as toothpicks in their minds. The racks look funny and too weak to meet their objectives. Furthermore, the author enhanced the use of imagery by describing the goldfish bowl. She selects descriptive words to represent color and size to enable the reader to create the image of the bowl in their minds. She says the bowl looks just like a jug. The use of imagery in this context enhances the imagination of the reader. Katie then describes the dolls she proposes will inhabit her house to have soft bodies and bendable limbs (Haegele 1). The description enables the reader to feel the softness of the dolls in their minds as they continue reading. The reader also forms the image of a child receiving the toys and handling them in a personified manner. Katie goes further to enhance the imagery use when she describes the doll she browsed from the website. She describes the doll to possess human characters of holding a bag and standing in a mid-stride position. The doll appears as she is on her way to the door, as if she is going out. The reader forms a picture of a female human carrying the handbag and, therefore, enhances the imagery. The writer also describes the shipped dolls with their facial features in a way that inflicts the readers’ mind to form a picture of the appearance of the dolls. She even describes the doll’s clothing. The use of imagery enhances the story’s tone of humor. The writer portrays the child’s naive perspective of viewing dolls as live human beings capable of performing physical tasks. Lastly, the author gives symbolic names to the dolls. She gives the dolls symbolic names resembling flowers since women associate with and like flowers. The use of symbolism in this context is humorous as well, thus expanding on the tone. The story’s diction becomes evident when the author deliberately used menstrual periods to depict age. She associates the number of periods with an individual’s age. She presents the diction in a humorous tone when she admits feeling funny before the periods began. The occurrence of the periods made the writer realize her age. She consequently felt too old and embarrassed to be playing with the dolls. She the embarrassment every other time she saw the dolls. The author applies the use of detail when she describes the characters of the story as of particular traits. She described her sister Liz as generous when she offered her a lift to ferry the doll to her new apartment. She described her parents as hardworking and loving when they stayed late every night while working on the dolls. They cared for their daughter’s happiness. The story also portrays the woman who sold the dolls as caring. She emailed Katie to enquire about how she felt about the toys (Haegele 1). She knew that Katie felt happy to receive the dolls. The descriptions inflict some sense of humor as the accounts occur as if in a child’s world. The relationship of the author with other characters in the story is naïve and inflicts humor as well. Katie wrote the story for a general audience leisure reading. The purpose best explains the deliberate use of humor in the story to create a relaxing mood for the reader during the leisure times. The reader finds joy in reading the story because of the sentence formats and ridicule contained at irregular intervals in the story. The language use and sentence forms also enhance the tone in the story. The words are short and follow a sequence as in the narratives. The story ends in a joking yet humorous tone. Katie simultaneously feels stupid for what she had just done to the dollhouse and free to do what she wants. Works Cited Haegele, Katie. "Second Home: Welcome to My Dollhouse." The Pennsylvania Gazette, 3 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 May 2015. < http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0313/voices.hstml > Read More