Tone is the implied attitude of the writer or the speaker towards subject, material, and audience; the emotional coloring or emotional meaning of the work.

• Overstatement (hyperbole): saying more than one what really means. Language that is so intense or exaggerated it must be read as meaning less than it literally states; a figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth (ex: a beggar to one who drops a penny into the tin cup: "I'm rich!")
• Understatement (litotes): saying less than one what really means. Language that obviously underrates something or portrays it as lesser than it is usually thought to be; a figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrants (ex: saying that a person who holds her hand for half an hour in a lighted fire will experience "a sensation of excessive and disagreeable warmth")

• Irony: a situation or a use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy:

  • verbal irony: saying the opposite of what one really means; a figure of speech in which what is meant is the opposite of what is said (ex: to the cad who shoulders in front of you on the subway and then takes the last seat: "Aren't you the gentleman!")

  • dramatic irony: a discrepancy between what the speaker says and what the author means; the unexpected fulfillment or reversal of a character's expectations; a device by which the author implies a different meaning from that indented by the speaker in a literary work (ex: the closing line of William Blake's "The Chimneysweeper": "So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.")
  • situational irony: a situation in which there is an incongruity between actual circumstances and those that would seem appropriate or between what is anticipated and what actually comes to pass (the conclusion of Maupassant's "The Necklace")

Updated: 08.18.07