PTE Online Review Tips: Understanding Tone and Mood in a Text

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PTE Online Review Tips: Understanding Tone and Mood in a Text Looking for ways to boost your reading comprehension skills? One of the most effective reading strategies that you can apply in your PTE online review training is learning about tone and mood in a text.

Understanding Tone and Mood in a Text Tone and mood are two literary elements that help create the main idea of a story or a text. While these two both deal with the emotions centered on the reading passage, they are in fact quite different. As a PTE test taker, learning about these two literary elements enables you to understand

the text easily. To guide you more and boost your PTE online course review preparation, here are the things that you need to know about the tone and mood of a text:

What is tone?

Tone is the author’s attitude in the text. Normally, an author uses various words and phrases that enable them to describe the main topic of the text. Although editorial writing has a tone of distance and objectivity, all other writings have various tones.

How to identify the tone in a text?

Tone is not explicitly stated in the text but rather inferred through clues such as: 

Author’s word choice – Word choice plays a vital role in identifying the tone of a text. It shows the level of formality that the author is using when discussing the subject. To determine the tone, you must check the connotation or emotional value associated with the words that the author uses.

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Author’s purpose – The author’s purpose usually fits into three categories: to persuade, to inform, and to entertain. In each category, the author uses different tones to emphasize their point. By knowing the author’s purpose, it will be easier for you to know the tone of the text.

What is mood?

Mood is the feeling you get while reading a text. It could be happiness, sadness, anger, loneliness, excitement, or even suspicion. Mood is also referred to as the atmosphere of the text. Basically, writers use mood descriptors to help their readers get the emotions of the text. To enhance your PTE online course review training more, here are some common mood descriptors:

Positive Mood Words

Negative Mood Descriptors

amused

distressed

excited

embarrassed

glowed

peaceful

drained

nervous

relaxed

surprised

painful

envious

grateful

scared

rejected

thankful

To describe the mood in a text, check for any mood descriptors used by the author. Check this example: He clustered in the corner, clutching her tattered blanket and shaking convulsively, as he nervously searched the room for the dangers that awaited him.

By analyzing the example above, you can see that the author’s used various negative mood descriptors such as clustered, clutching, shaking convulsively, nervously, and dangers. These words simply explain that the mood of the sentence is scary or frightening.

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