Glossary
tone
Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject, carried by the words chosen — not by the subject itself, and not by how the passage makes you feel.
Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject, and it lives in the words chosen rather than in the subject itself. The same pothole crew can be written about with sympathy or with contempt; what changes is the detail selected and the adjective attached to it. The method is to find the one or two words carrying the attitude and to say that attitude in a plain word — fond, dry, urgent, impatient, careful, admiring — before you read the options. Two mistakes are common. Reading the subject instead of the wording: a passage about a failure is not automatically disapproving, and one about a rescue is not automatically warm. And taking the passage's own words at face value: a slogan quoted beside the date the truck was photographed still wearing it is not praise, however cheerful the slogan is. A tone item is decided by a quotation, so if you cannot quote the words behind your answer, you are describing your own reaction rather than the writer's.
Taught in
Related terms
- point of view — Point of view is who is speaking in a passage and what that voice knows, assumes or wants — found in the pronouns and in what the passage chooses to report.
- author purpose — The author purpose is the job a passage, or one line of it, is doing — informing, persuading, warning, recommending, explaining a process or comparing two framings — and it is named from the writing, never from the topic.
- connotation — Connotation is the feeling a word carries beyond its dictionary meaning — why thrifty and stingy can describe the same habit and land differently.
- loaded language — Loaded language is a word chosen for the judgment it carries — the writer's conclusion arriving inside the noun, before any reason is given.
Source: The reading skills ATI names in its own Content Outline (R.2.1-R.2.4, under the Craft and structure sub-content area), plus the tone and passage-structure skills that sub-content area's published description names; each definition below is written for the Craft and Structure guide in this exam, in our own words, and explains the skill the way the guide teaches it. (ATI Content Outline read 2026-10-09; definitions written 2026-10-09)