When we talk about speeches, we often comment on their tone.
Just the other day, in fact, I was reading the paper about how the prime minister's
speech struck a conciliatory tone.
The attitude of the speech was notable.
I hear it at university every spring,
commencement speakers attempt to convey a hopeful tone in their comments.
Some succeed, some fail, some are like, congrats grads, now you have only work and
death to look forward to.
Enjoy the crippling debt.
So tone isn't just what they said.
It's not just the content.
It's how it felt.
And there's a good book that analyzes political tone in speeches, and
in it the authors define tone as a tool people use, sometimes unwittingly,
to create distinct social impressions via word choice.
So in this sense, style might give us a general sense for the register, but
tone reveals our attitudes.
So an award ceremony can be lighthearted or it can be ornate.
A wedding speech can be jovial or reserved.
Style includes a wide range of things, syntax, stylistic devices, and so on and
so forth.
Tone is mostly about word choice.
How specific words reinforce one another and convey the speakers mood or attitude.
These individual word choices build up over time,
they accumulate to the overall tone.
So in ceremonial speaking tone's pretty important.
Tone provides the emotional framework for our comments.
It's a big element in our speech, but it's often pretty hard to define.
How do you write a hopeful tone?
Well, as we'll see, it largely comes down to a matter of word choice, and
I think the best way to get better at writing tone is to study it in others.
So in the next few videos,
we'll do a comparison of two similar speeches that differ in tone.
One by President Reagan, one by President Bush.
Looking at these two speeches can help us better understand tone and write it well
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