Quiz 8 · Connotation, Denotation & Tone — The Talking Hands Series

First, the idea

Every word does two things at once. It points at something, and it carries a feeling about it. The pointing is the word's denotation: its dictionary meaning, the thing it refers to. The feeling is its connotation: the attitude the word brings with it, picked up from everywhere you have heard it used. Thin, slender, and scrawny all point at the same body. Only one of them is a compliment, and only one is an insult.

Connotation is why two true sentences can leave opposite impressions. The tenants asked for answers and The tenants demanded answers report the same event. The second sentence has an opinion about it, and so does The tenants begged for answers. Same facts, three attitudes, and the only thing that changed was the verb.

Add up the connotations across a whole passage and you get its tone: the writer's attitude toward the subject, and sometimes toward the reader. Tone is almost never stated. A writer does not say "I am skeptical"; she writes the company's latest promise, and latest does the work. Some tone words worth having ready: warm, respectful, matter-of-fact, urgent, skeptical, weary, mocking, bitter, admiring. The test asks about all this in three ways: which word has the most positive (or negative) connotation; what a writer's choice of one particular word suggests about her attitude; and which phrase best describes the tone of the passage.

A word is a drawing. The denotation is the outline: the shape the dictionary draws, the same in every hand. The connotation is the shading: the pressure and darkness the writer adds, which is where the feeling lives. Tone is what the whole drawing looks like when you step back from it.

So read twice. Once for the outline: what is this sentence reporting? Once for the shading: which words could have been swapped for a plainer word, and what did the writer's choice add? The shaded words are your evidence. Tone is an inference (Quiz 4), and like every inference it has to point to the sentences that hold it up.

Two wrong answers come up on every item of this kind. The first is what this quiz calls the dictionary answer: the option that correctly defines the word and ignores the feeling. It is true, and it answers a question nobody asked. The second shades too dark: it reads more attitude into a word than the word carries, and calls a skeptical writer furious. Match the weight of your tone word to the weight of the shading on the page.

Worked example — thinking out loud

A sentence from a neighborhood newsletter: After four months of calls, the management company finally sent a repair crew. Outline first: a crew was sent; it took four months. Now the shading. Sent a repair crew is plain; almost any writer would put it that way. The shaded word is finally. The sentence would still be true without it, so the writer chose to put it there. Finally carries relief, and under the relief, a complaint: this took too long. The writer's attitude toward the management company is impatient, not grateful, though a crew did come.

The tempting wrong path: a reader fixes on sent and repair crew and concludes that the tone is positive, since help arrived. That is the dictionary answer. It reads what happened and misses how the writer feels about it. The other wrong path shades too dark: finally does not make the writer furious. Four months of calls is a complaint, made quietly. Impatient is the right weight; enraged is not.

☞ You have crossed from what a text says into how it says it. Behind you: Quiz 4 (inference — tone is an inference, and it needs evidence) and Quiz 7 (vocabulary in context — the glove read a word's meaning from the sentence around it; this quiz reads the feeling the word brings with it). Ahead: Quiz 9 (figurative language), Quiz 12 (the author's purpose and point of view, which tone gives away), Quiz 13 (rhetorical technique, where connotation goes to work persuading), and Quiz 42, where you do the shading yourself.

The key — and why the tempting answers tempt

Part A

1. B. All four describe a person who will not change course. Stubborn is the only one that blames them for it; firm and steady approve, and determined admires. C tempts because determined is the strongest word of the four. Strength is not negativity. A strong compliment is still a compliment.

2. A. Man for representative, told for informed, sold out from under them for would be sold: every change leans toward the tenants' view of the day. B tempts because the second sentence feels more vivid, and vividness reads as knowledge. Compare the outlines: both sentences contain exactly the same facts. The second added feeling, not information.

3. C. The writer borrows management's word and holds it at arm's length, and the rest of the sentence says why: changes every week, two days' notice. A is the dictionary answer. The marks do report that the word is management's, but the question asks what that reporting shows, and the second half of the sentence answers it.

4. D. Small keeps the fact, not much room, and drops the complaint. A tempts because it is the move every apartment listing makes. But cozy does not remove the connotation; it reverses it, and it adds a claim about comfort that the original never made. When the question asks for the neutral word, the flattering one is also wrong.

Part B — the notice and the reply

5. A. The two names have the same outline: the heat stopped. The tenants' name adds the cold and the people, and that addition is their whole argument in one sentence. The rest of the letter fills in the detail. C tempts because the tenants' sentence is longer and more exact, and exactness can look technical. Look at what it is exact about: nights, degrees, children, residents over eighty. The company's phrase is the technical one.

6. B. Unavoidable says that nothing could have been done, which means that no one is to blame. A tempts because sentence 2 opens with We are aware, which sounds like taking ownership. Being aware of a problem and being responsible for it are different things, and unavoidable closes the door on the second. Sentence 10 is the tenants' answer to that one word.

7. C. The letter asks for a date, a plan, and a reply by Friday; it says we look forward; it insults no one. That is civil. It also corrects the notice's words one at a time, not an assessment, a repair, and sentence 12 asks a question the company will not enjoy. That is firm. A is the too-dark reading. Readers supply the anger they would feel in the tenants' place; the test asks what the page shows, and there is no raised voice anywhere on it. Quiz 4's rule holds: point to the sentence, or it is a guess.

8. D. Pleased, appreciate, and look forward are the warm words of a form letter, and they are real. So is what sits around them: unavoidable, an assessment with no date, the coming weeks, and, in the same notice, the end of the grace period. The warm words are the surface. The other sentences are what the notice commits to, which is nothing. A is the dictionary answer at the scale of a whole document: the words do mean what they say. Tone is what they are doing next to the sentences around them. C shades too dark. The notice is not hostile; it is careful, which is a different thing, and telling the two apart is the skill.

Quiz 8 · Connotation, Denotation & Tone

First, the idea

Worked example — thinking out loud

Part A · The skill by itself

Part B · The skill in the wild

The key — and why the tempting answers tempt

Part A

Part B — the notice and the reply