Humanities Passages · Lesson 2

Tone and attitude in a personal essay

Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject, shown through word choice, detail, and what the writer chooses to joke about or linger on. Tone questions look like "The author's attitude toward x is best described as:" or "The last sentence is best described as:".

Personal essays rarely have a single, simple tone. A writer can be fond of a person and amused by her habits, or appreciative of something while admitting its limits. So collect the evidence first: underline the evaluation words and notice any humor. Then name the attitude in your own words before you look at the choices.

Most wrong tone choices fail in one of three ways: they are too strong (bitter, scornful, ecstatic, despairing for a passage with mild language), the opposite (indifferent for a writer who spends a whole winter on something), or unsupported (a feeling the text never shows).

Precise tone words and their clues
Tone wordWhat it meansTypical clue
wrydry, quietly amuseda joke told with a straight face
affectionatewarm, fondloving detail, gentle teasing
nostalgicfondly looking backI still think about, back then
appreciative but criticalvalues it, sees flawspraise followed by but, still, yet
bitter, scornfulresentful, contemptuousharsh words; rarely right in a calm essay

My Aunt's Recipe Tin

1My aunt Rosalind wrote her recipes on whatever paper was nearby, the backs of envelopes, mostly, and kept them in a dented cookie tin. She wrote them for an audience of one: herself. A typical recipe lists five ingredients, three of them without amounts. "Flour, enough." "Butter, the usual." The oven temperature is given as "hot, not too." The instructions for her lemon cake end with a single word, underlined twice: "Watch."

2When the tin came to me, I assumed I could cook from it the way I cook from any book. I was wrong in a way that took most of a winter to understand. My first lemon cake came out of the oven pale and dense, a sort of sweet brick. My second burned along one edge. By the fourth, I had begun keeping my own notes in the margins, in pencil, out of something like respect: "the usual" means one stick, softened; "hot, not too" means 350 degrees, maybe 340.

3It would be easy to call the recipes careless, and in one sense they are. But the longer I worked with them, the more I saw that they were not meant to teach anyone. They were meant to remind. Rosalind did not need to write "one stick of butter" because she had used one stick a thousand times. What she needed to write down was only what her hands might forget. The envelopes are less a set of instructions than a record of what she already knew.

4Cookbooks, by contrast, are written for strangers. They have to assume nothing, which is why they spell out every quantity and warn you, in a friendly paragraph, about common mistakes. I own a shelf of them and value them. Still, I have noticed that I never think of the authors while I follow their directions. With Rosalind's envelopes, I can't help it. Every blank where a number should be is a place where I picture her standing at the counter, not measuring.

5My lemon cake is reliable now. It is not quite hers; I suspect she used more lemon than the envelope admits. I have started a tin of my own, and I notice that my recipes are becoming more like hers each year, shorter and stranger. Somebody will inherit them eventually. I hope they have a free winter.

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My Aunt's Recipe Tin

1My aunt Rosalind wrote her recipes on whatever paper was nearby, the backs of envelopes, mostly, and kept them in a dented cookie tin. She wrote them for an audience of one: herself. A typical recipe lists five ingredients, three of them without amounts. "Flour, enough." "Butter, the usual." The oven temperature is given as "hot, not too." The instructions for her lemon cake end with a single word, underlined twice: "Watch."

2When the tin came to me, I assumed I could cook from it the way I cook from any book. I was wrong in a way that took most of a winter to understand. My first lemon cake came out of the oven pale and dense, a sort of sweet brick. My second burned along one edge. By the fourth, I had begun keeping my own notes in the margins, in pencil, out of something like respect: "the usual" means one stick, softened; "hot, not too" means 350 degrees, maybe 340.

3It would be easy to call the recipes careless, and in one sense they are. But the longer I worked with them, the more I saw that they were not meant to teach anyone. They were meant to remind. Rosalind did not need to write "one stick of butter" because she had used one stick a thousand times. What she needed to write down was only what her hands might forget. The envelopes are less a set of instructions than a record of what she already knew.

4Cookbooks, by contrast, are written for strangers. They have to assume nothing, which is why they spell out every quantity and warn you, in a friendly paragraph, about common mistakes. I own a shelf of them and value them. Still, I have noticed that I never think of the authors while I follow their directions. With Rosalind's envelopes, I can't help it. Every blank where a number should be is a place where I picture her standing at the counter, not measuring.

5My lemon cake is reliable now. It is not quite hers; I suspect she used more lemon than the envelope admits. I have started a tin of my own, and I notice that my recipes are becoming more like hers each year, shorter and stranger. Somebody will inherit them eventually. I hope they have a free winter.

The author's attitude toward the vague directions in Rosalind's recipes is best described as:

  1. affectionate amusementAnswer
  2. bitter frustration
  3. complete indifference
  4. scornful disapproval

How to solve it

  1. Collect the attitude clues: the joke about "a sort of sweet brick," notes kept "out of something like respect," picturing Rosalind "at the counter, not measuring."
  2. Name the attitude yourself: warm, with humor.
  3. Reject the choices that are too strong (bitter, scornful) or the opposite (indifference).

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Correct. The author quotes the recipes with gentle humor ("Flour, enough."), keeps notes "out of something like respect," and pictures Rosalind "standing at the counter, not measuring."
  • B. Incorrect. Bitter is too strong. The failed cakes are told as a joke ("a sort of sweet brick"), and the author ends up writing recipes the same way.
  • C. Incorrect. The author spends "most of a winter" on the recipes and thinks of Rosalind at every blank; that is the opposite of indifference.
  • D. Incorrect. The author grants that the recipes could be called careless, then sets that aside: "they were not meant to teach anyone. They were meant to remind."

Worked example Medium

Show the whole passage

My Aunt's Recipe Tin

1My aunt Rosalind wrote her recipes on whatever paper was nearby, the backs of envelopes, mostly, and kept them in a dented cookie tin. She wrote them for an audience of one: herself. A typical recipe lists five ingredients, three of them without amounts. "Flour, enough." "Butter, the usual." The oven temperature is given as "hot, not too." The instructions for her lemon cake end with a single word, underlined twice: "Watch."

2When the tin came to me, I assumed I could cook from it the way I cook from any book. I was wrong in a way that took most of a winter to understand. My first lemon cake came out of the oven pale and dense, a sort of sweet brick. My second burned along one edge. By the fourth, I had begun keeping my own notes in the margins, in pencil, out of something like respect: "the usual" means one stick, softened; "hot, not too" means 350 degrees, maybe 340.

3It would be easy to call the recipes careless, and in one sense they are. But the longer I worked with them, the more I saw that they were not meant to teach anyone. They were meant to remind. Rosalind did not need to write "one stick of butter" because she had used one stick a thousand times. What she needed to write down was only what her hands might forget. The envelopes are less a set of instructions than a record of what she already knew.

4Cookbooks, by contrast, are written for strangers. They have to assume nothing, which is why they spell out every quantity and warn you, in a friendly paragraph, about common mistakes. I own a shelf of them and value them. Still, I have noticed that I never think of the authors while I follow their directions. With Rosalind's envelopes, I can't help it. Every blank where a number should be is a place where I picture her standing at the counter, not measuring.

5My lemon cake is reliable now. It is not quite hers; I suspect she used more lemon than the envelope admits. I have started a tin of my own, and I notice that my recipes are becoming more like hers each year, shorter and stranger. Somebody will inherit them eventually. I hope they have a free winter.

The last sentence of the passage ("I hope they have a free winter") is best described as:

  1. a firm instruction about when the recipes may be used
  2. an expression of regret that the author ever began cooking from Rosalind's tin
  3. a wry joke that the author's recipes will be hard to followAnswer
  4. a sad admission that the author has given up baking and hopes someone else will take over

How to solve it

  1. Link the sentence to an earlier detail: decoding Rosalind's recipes "took most of a winter."
  2. Notice that the author's own recipes are "becoming more like hers each year, shorter and stranger."
  3. So the wish is a dry joke: whoever inherits them will need a winter too.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. The sentence is a hope, not an instruction, and it sets no rule for using the recipes.
  • B. Incorrect. The cake "is reliable now" and the author has "started a tin of my own"; nothing shows regret.
  • C. Correct. The author's recipes are getting "shorter and stranger," like Rosalind's, which took "most of a winter" to understand. Wishing the heir a free winter is a dry joke about the same puzzle.
  • D. Incorrect. The author still bakes ("My lemon cake is reliable now"), and "Somebody will inherit them eventually" looks ahead without sadness.

Trap Tone words that are too strong

Calm personal essays almost never call for bitter, scornful, furious, or ecstatic. If the writer jokes about a failure, the tone is amused, not angry. If the writer values something but feels distant from it, the tone is appreciative, not devoted. Match the strength of the choice to the strength of the words in the passage.