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BlackHippyChick Day: Tone

Added 2024-10-04 08:48:21 +0000 UTC

One of the most famous passages in literary history goes like this:

“O Romeo, Romeo, my dude, wherefore art thou, bloodyhell?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name, like, please, guy.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love!
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Like, seriously, fuck Capulets.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy, you sexy beast. Mmmm!
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What the fuck is Montague?””

That is how it goes, right? Well, no. Shakespeare was famously opposed to the terms “dude” and “mmm.” He wrote a newsletter about both of those words for his writing workshop. It’s totally true. Shakespeare pretty much ended all his sentences with “eths” and “thous.” If you read an unlabelled excerpt, you’d know it was Shakespeare who wrote it immediately.

The Great Bard used formal prose. If you put modern-day colloquialisms into his work, they’d appear jarring or even funny. An inconsistent tone is always going to have an effect on the reader, and if you haven’t chosen those inconsistencies for a reason, you can safely assume you’ll create problems.

You wouldn’t write a legal letter with a Shakespearean tone and you wouldn’t write legal jargon into a children’s book. You wouldn’t write a colloquial meta-study, and you wouldn’t use slang in a newspaper article.

Even if you're a beginner, you probably achieve that consistency without even thinking about it, but tone can become rather complex. Writing can be jubilant, anxiety-provoking, or assertive. It can be concise, curious, or uplifting. These, too, should be consistent throughout your text unless you have a reason to break your own rules. That isn’t always as easy as it might sound, so when you write, you should be conscious of the consistency of your tone.