Today In English 11/1

Nadir Hassan/Mr. Rivers,Miss Dalia/American Literature/November 1

Today’s objective during class was to:

Create specific and clear sentences that explain the development of mood and tone and

Analyze how connotation and denotation develop tone (Which, in turn, develops meaning)

During today’s class, Mr. Rivers started off by explaining the difference between mood and tone. Last night’s homework (“Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe) was reviewed as a class after individually doing it for homework the previous night. In our groups we spent five to six minutes formulating the perfect sentence to describe the mood present and how it is developed through the short story.  After we formulated our sentences, we posted them on to Google Classroom (where you can see it) and picked them apart seeing which ones had great detail and key phrases and which ones could use some improvement. After reviewing the sentences, we discovered that using active verbs, using specific evidence, and adjectives prove to be successful in describing the mood and how it is developed throughout a text. Then, we dove deeper into the meaning of tone and looked at some examples. An example of tone is “Andrew Clark is the student athlete from The Breakfast Club and Andrew Clark is the jock from the Breakfast Club”. The key word here being used are “student athlete” and “jock”. We see that using “jock” (connotation) gives off a stereotypical connotation of a negative feeling while “student athlete” (denotation) gives off a more positive feeling, a more prestigious setting.  Denotation is the literal definition of the word. Connotation is the socially understood meaning of a word. “Jock” is a socially understood meaning of a word that gives the impression that someone is not as smart nor intelligent, “a meathead”. The key difference between connotation and denotation is that connotation is socially understood meaning that it can and most likely will change meaning over time. The last discussion we talked about was to always remember to vary tone to fit the audience and purpose.