Tone and Style Analysis

Are you worried about the style analysis essay on the AP English Lit exam?  The library is a great place to practice your skills with a multitude of texts in a variety of forms.

An effective starting point for learning about style analysis is to learn some jargon related to literary analysis. This will be a great help to you throughout the course and the exam, and is absolutely necessary for the free-response essays.

Let's think about emotions as a way to label an author's tone. A poem can be happy or sad or angry, but an effective AP analysis requires more sophisticated vocabulary. Fortunately, your librarian can help.

Image: Machine Elf 1735 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The image above shows Plutchik's "wheel of emotions" that can help you build your vocabulary to improve your identification of an author's tones. Come to the library to learn how to read the wheel (hint: it's more like a pyramid), see another way of looking at it, and to practice with some fun texts.