Tone is a literary device that reflects the writer’s attitude toward the subject matter or audience of a literary work. By conveying this attitude through tone, the writer creates a particular relationship with the reader that, in turn, influences the intention and meaning of the written words. However, though the writer’s tone may reflect their personal attitude or opinion, this literary device may also strictly apply to convey the attitudes and feelings of a certain character or narrator. Therefore, it is essential for readers to look closely at the literary choices made by the writer so as not to unfairly assign a tone to them and to interpret tone judiciously.

Writers use several techniques to convey tone, including word choice, figurative language, punctuation and even sentence structure. This helps to establish a narrative voice so that the reader not only understands the words as they are presented in a work but also their meanings, as intended by the writer, character or narrator. A defined tone allows the readers to connect with the writer and/or the narrator and characters.

For example, in his short story The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe utilizes tone as a literary device to convey the way the narrator feels about the old man and his eye.

His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watches and waits while an animal dies, and then, falls upon the dead body and pulls it to pieces to eat it.