Difference between voice and tone
Voice vs tone:
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes.
What is voice?
Voice is the distinct personality, style, or point of view of a piece of writing or any other creative work. Voice is the author’s style, the quality that makes his or her writing unique, and which conveys the author’s attitude, personality, and character; or it is the characteristic speech and thought patterns of a first-person narrator; a persona. Because voice has so much to do with the reader’s experience of a work of literature, it is one of the most important elements of a piece of writing. The writer’s voice is the individual writing style of an author, a combination of idiotypical usage of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works). Voice can be thought of in terms of the uniqueness of a vocal voice machine. As a trumpet has a different voice than a tuba or a violin has a different voice than a cello, so the words of one author have a different sound than the words of another. One author may have a voice that is light and fast paced while another may have a dark voice. “Voice” is the way that someone “speaks” on paper. It is how the words come across to the reader, and it will be different for every writer. Voice depends on the style the writer choose – formal, informal, technical, chatty, poetic – and the words he chooses to express this style – simple words, scientific words, “high-falutin” words, slang words. The writer also uses different voices for his characters. A college-educated businessman speaks in a different voice than a high-school dropout, and a country hick speaks in a different voice than a world traveller.
What is tone?
In written composition, tone is often defined as what the author (rather than the reader) feels about the subject. (What the reader feels about it, by contrast, is referred to as the mood.) Tone in writing can be defined as attitude or emotion toward the subject and the reader. Tone is also sometimes confused with voice, which can be explained as the author’s personality expressed in writing. Tone can also be compared to differing attitudes of human behavior — the difference, for instance, in how you behave at work, at church and at a party. Like the tone of a speaker’s voice, the tone of a work of literature expresses the writer’s feelings. A work’s tone can usually be described with an adjective or two: bitter, playful, sarcastic, and so on. Using the appropriate tone in business writing is an important aspect of communicating the desired message and of achieving the desired results. In turn, the appropriate tone will help to engage reader and propel him or her to action. Below are tips that will help achieve the proper tone in business correspondence. In creative writing, tone is more subjective, but it also requires focus on communication. The genre often determines the tone — thrillers use tight, lean phrasing, romances (hearty adventures as well as adventures of the heart) tends to be more effusive and expressive, comedies more buoyant, and so on. Tone is delivered in the form of syntax and usage, in imagery and symbolism, allusion and metaphor, and other literary tools and techniques, but that shouldn’t imply that developing tone is a technical enterprise that involves a checklist. A writer’s tone is very important, as it conveys a particular message from you as the writer and likewise affects the reader in a particular way. Consequently, it can also affect how the reader receives the message you are communicating.
What is the difference between tone and voice?
For many, tone and voice seem synonymous, and it is easy to see why people might
feel this way, however, the terms are decidedly different. But before either can be properly differentiated, it is important to take a close look at writers who mastered voice. Voice is similar to tone in that it has to do with the audience’s perception of your writing. Voice is that peculiar — sometimes very peculiar — quality that allows the audience to read a sentence and know that you wrote it. The tone of a paper is easy to discern but often difficult to explain. When we analyse a paper’s structure, we know what we’re looking for — a clear and logical development from introduction through careful arguments to some rousing conclusion. But the feel of a paper is a less tangible thing. The factors that influence our perception of tone are varied and subtle — so subtle that we may not always be aware of them. The voices of poetry, however, must contrive to produce in print all those effects that a speaker, face-to-face with his audience, creates by tone, gesture, and stance. TONE in poetry comprises the attitudes of the poet toward his subject and toward his audience, as they can be inferred from the poem. These attitudes need not always be separately distinguishable in a poem, but the sensitive reader is ready to respond to them as they present themselves. What clues will the reader have to these attitudes? Tone shows itself most often in diction, but also appears in images, cadences, rhythms, or any other events in the poem. While voice can be attributed as a writer’s representation of the truth that he depicts, tone only pertains to his attitude.
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