Tone, and the Tone Lexicon

This is Unit Four of Analyzing and Interpreting Literature, part two of two. Part one closed on the board's five undefined words, fixed one by one. This part finishes the lexicon and puts it to work. Part one's governing idea was that tone is the handling and not the subject. This part pays it off on Swift, whose calm survey of Irish beggars turns into a recipe without a change of register, and on Fielding, whose vocabulary of greatness fastens to a thief. In both, a candidate who answers from the subject gets it wrong and a candidate who reads the manner gets it right. First the lexicon is completed: approving terms, disapproving terms, the detached vocabulary candidates under-select, and four pairs the board builds its distractors from. Then Swift and Fielding are each worked to a tone answer. Then the read to use under time, and the four traps. Last, the tone-shift question, which asks where the manner turns, and whose hardest instance is the one inside Swift, where the words barely move. By the end you will be able to use the three further vocabularies and hold each term by what it excludes. To name Swift's tone and Fielding's, and say why they differ. To read for tone evidence under time and defeat four traps. And to locate a hinge from its mechanical signals.

Five entries that finish the lexicon: the approving side, the disapproving side, the detached vocabulary, the four pairs most often confused, and the way to learn any of them.

The approving side of the lexicon.

AIL 0326 Lexicon: Further Terms, Approving

Beyond the board's examples, a working lexicon needs approving terms: reverent, laudatory, affectionate, wistful, elegiac. These are standard senses and the glossary defines none of them. Elegiac is worth singling out, because it names mourning that has settled into acceptance rather than fresh grief, and that settledness is what the word claims.

Disapproval differs in heat and target.

AIL 0327 Lexicon: Further Terms, Disapproving

The disapproving side needs scathing, contemptuous, derisive, censorious and indignant. They differ in heat and in target. Indignant claims a wrong has been done; contemptuous claims the target is beneath notice. The distinction between those two is frequently the whole question, so indignant and contemptuous are not near neighbours at all.

Neutral options feel too plain to be right.

AIL 0328 Lexicon: Further Terms, Detached

Detachment has its own vocabulary: dispassionate, clinical, matter-of-fact, reportorial, measured. Each describes a writer withholding any evident attitude from the page. They are often the correct answer for eighteenth-century prose, and candidates tend to reject them because a neutral option feels insufficiently literary to be right. Candidates under-select these.

Four pairs the distractors are built from.

AIL 0329 Lexicon: The Pairs Most Often Confused

Four pairings repay drilling: ironic against sarcastic, where sarcasm is irony aimed to wound; nostalgic against elegiac; ambivalent against indifferent, where ambivalence has feeling on both sides; and resigned against defeated. Distractors are built from exactly these near-misses, and ambivalence is not indifference, whatever the two share on the surface.

Learn each term by what it rules out.

AIL 0330 Drilling the Lexicon Against Itself

Learn these terms in opposed pairs rather than as a list, because the exam presents them that way. For each term, be able to name what it excludes. A term whose exclusions you cannot state is a term you cannot use to eliminate an option, and elimination is what the compound options ask for.

Six entries on Swift: the manner of his opening, why the manner matters, the sentence where the gap opens, the tone named, the petitioner's diction, and a word sense inside the passage.

Orderly, counting, and unhurried.

AIL 0331 Swift's Opening: The Manner

A Modest Proposal opens by calling it a melancholy object to walk through the town and see the roads and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four or six children, all in rags. The manner is orderly, even statistical. Note the counting of the children.

The calm is assumed, not felt.

AIL 0332 Swift's Opening: Why the Manner Matters

Melancholy object is the language of a survey, not of outrage. Swift adopts the voice of a public-spirited economist throughout. That borrowed voice is the instrument, and a candidate who reads the calm as indifference has mistaken the instrument for the attitude. Here is part one's governing idea paid off: the handling is the point.

The register holds while the content turns.

AIL 0333 Swift's Proposal: The Gap Opens

Swift writes that he has been assured by a very knowing American that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled. The register has not changed. Only the content has, and this is satire, not a recommendation.

Any answer must explain the calm.

AIL 0334 Naming Swift's Tone

The manner is level and reportorial; the matter is atrocious; the target is a governing class indifferent to Irish poverty. By the anchor's definitions that is Juvenalian satire working through sustained verbal irony. A tone answer here must account for the calm, not ignore it, because the calm is the device.

Two phrases carry the method.

AIL 0335 Swift's "Humbly Propose"

Swift says he will humbly propose his own thoughts, which he hopes will not be liable to the least objection. Humbly and the least objection are the diction of a modest petitioner. Holding that register while proposing cannibalism is the whole technique in two phrases, and those two phrases are the evidence to cite.

Word sense and tone arrive together.

AIL 0336 "Want of Work" in Swift

Swift writes that the children as they grow up either turn thieves for want of work or leave their native country. Want means lack, the sense worked in unit three. The archaic sense appears inside the passage a tone question is asked about, so the two skills are not separable on this exam.

Five entries on Fielding: the ironic chapter title, the elevated opening, the praise fastened to a thief, the tone named against Swift's, and one more shifted word sense.

Irony can start at the heading.

AIL 0337 Fielding's Chapter Title

Fielding heads his first chapter as showing the wholesome uses drawn from recording the achievements of those wonderful productions of nature called great men. The book's subject is a criminal. Wholesome, wonderful and great are all doing ironic work before the narrative has begun, so the reading starts at the title.

Elevation is the setup.

AIL 0338 Fielding's Elevated Opening

Fielding writes that great and surprising events, brought to perfection by the utmost force of human invention and art, are produced by great and eminent men, whose lives he says may be styled the quintessence of history. The diction is that of serious historiography, and the elevation is what the next sentence will use.

The object supplies the attack.

AIL 0339 Fielding's Praise Applied to a Thief

That vocabulary of greatness is then fastened to Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker and criminal. Fielding calls him the illustrious person whose history we now undertake, given the greatest and most shining endowments. The praise is unchanged; only its object makes it savage, and the praise never drops its register.

Same device, different heat.

AIL 0340 Naming Fielding's Tone

Sustained verbal irony again, but the heat differs from Swift's. Fielding is mocking a type and enjoying the performance, which puts him nearer the Horatian end. Two passages using one device can still need different tone words, and that is the distinction the exam pays for. Nearer Horatian than Swift is.

Sensible is judicious here.

AIL 0341 "Sensible Writers" in Fielding

Fielding says such lives are most agreeable and instructive when delivered to us by sensible writers. Sensible means judicious or perceptive, not emotionally responsive. The glossary has no entry for it, and the modern sense would make the phrase mean something Fielding did not write. Another shifted sense inside a tone passage.

Five entries on procedure: the four-piece read to use under time, and then the four traps the board builds, one entry each.

Four pieces of evidence settle most questions.

AIL 0342 Finding Tone Evidence Under Time

Read the first sentence and the last, then scan for the three most loaded words in between. Those four pieces of evidence settle most tone questions. A full re-reading is rarely affordable at the pace unit one established for this exam, so the four-piece read is the one to practise.

The topic is not the answer.

AIL 0343 Trap One: Answering From the Subject

The commonest error, and the reason for entry after entry above: a passage about death draws candidates to somber, whatever its manner. The board relies on this. Ask what the writer's words do, not what the writer's topic is, because this trap catches the widest reader of all.

Strength is not accuracy.

AIL 0344 Trap Two: The Overstated Option

Options carrying extremity, contemptuous, savage, ecstatic, are usually too strong for a measured passage. The board includes one because strong words feel like decisive reading. Prefer the option the evidence supports over the option that sounds most perceptive, since one option is deliberately too loud for the page.

A good half is not a good option.

AIL 0345 Trap Three: The Half-Right Pair

A compound option will offer one half that fits the passage exactly and one that does not. Recognising the good half feels like recognising the answer. Part one's rule is the defence: test the half you doubt, and let it condemn the whole option. Recognition of one half is not enough.

Not false is not sufficient.

AIL 0346 Trap Four: The Flattened Option

Where a passage holds two attitudes in tension, one option will name only the more obvious one. It is not false, merely incomplete, and incomplete loses to the option that accounts for both. Unit one's rule that an answer must be pointable on the page applies here too, and the fuller option wins.

Four entries to close: the tone-shift question, what marks a hinge, the hard hinge inside Swift, and the handoff to the voice unit.

Two tones, and a hinge between them.

AIL 0347 The Tone-Shift Question

A separate question type asks where a passage's tone changes. It presupposes two tones and a hinge between them. The task is locating the hinge, which means finding the sentence where the diction stops belonging to the first attitude and starts belonging to the second. Two tones are presupposed by the question itself.

Mechanical signals come first.

AIL 0348 What Marks a Hinge

Hinges are usually visible: a conjunction such as yet or but at a sentence opening, a change of tense, a shift from general statement to particular instance, a question, or a sudden shortening of the sentences. Look for the mechanical signal before arguing from feel, since feel is what the distractors are built to exploit.

Here the register does not move.

AIL 0349 The Shift Inside Swift

Swift's hinge falls at the sentence introducing the very knowing American. Before it the passage surveys a real hardship. After it the register holds while the content becomes monstrous. The words barely change, which is why this hinge is a hard one and worth studying, and why the mechanical signals matter.

Next: whose attitude is it.

AIL 0350 What the Next Unit Does

Tone answered the question of attitude in the writing. The next unit asks whose attitude it is, separating speaker from author and taking up persona and irony as questions of voice. Swift's economist and Fielding's historian are the cases it begins from, because speaker and author are not one.

That is the lexicon finished, two passages worked, the traps, and the tone-shift question, with the governing idea paid off on Swift's borrowed voice. You have the approving terms with elegiac as settled mourning, the disapproving terms with indignant and contemptuous kept apart, the detached terms candidates under-select, the four confused pairs, and the rule that a term is its exclusions. You can work Swift from the melancholy object through the knowing American to Juvenalian satire through sustained verbal irony, with an answer that accounts for the calm, and read want as lack inside it. You can work Fielding from the ironic title through the illustrious thief to a tone nearer the Horatian end, and read sensible as judicious. You have the four-piece read for use under time, and the four traps: the subject, the overstated option, the half-right pair and the flattened option. And you can locate a hinge by conjunction, tense, scale and sentence length, including the hard one in Swift where the register does not move. Unit five asks whose attitude it is.