What Is Tone?Tone in writing is similar to, but not exactly the same as, tone of voice in speaking. The tone of a speaker's voice, as everyone knows, can convey a meaning—often an emotional meaning—that is additional to the plain meaning of the words spoken. It is possible, indeed, to take a particular set of words and imagine them being uttered in any number of different ways. Take the simple question "How many are there?" The meaning of these words will, in the first place, differ slightly depending on whether the speaker puts the stress on the word are or the word there, or, indeed, decides to stress the first word How. Moreover, you can easily imagine these words being spoken in a loud and bullying way by somebody who is trying to force information out of somebody else; in a timid and fearful way by somebody who is afraid that if there are a great many, he or she might be unable to cope; or in a tone of righteous indignation or shocked surprise by somebody who was expecting only a few and finds that there are in fact many.In each of these cases, the speaker will vary the stress pattern and, more important, impart an appropriate quality to his or her voice. Quite possibly he or she will accompany the question with a gesture or with some kind of body language in order to reinforce that voice quality. If accompanied by a reassuring arm around the shoulders, the question could be made to sound encouraging and be made to carry the implication "Don't worry. However many there are, we'll cope." If accompanied by a wide-eyed look of wonder, it could convey the notion "You must be a very extraordinary person to have so many."Unfortunately, as far as the writer is concerned, all of this is neither here nor there.How many are there?That is how the words look on the page or on the screen. You can put them into upper case, italic, or bold, you can write them in any color you like, but there is nothing you can really do with them, as they stand, to convey any of the richness of meaning that a speaker could communicate by flexing his or her vocal cords in a particular way, stretching out an arm, angling the body, or fluttering an eyelash.How many are there?There is nothing that the reader can do with these words, either. This is something that is very important for writers to understand. Until informed or persuaded otherwise, readers will assume that what they are reading is neutral. If they associate the words on the page with any tone of voice at all, they will take it for granted that they are being delivered in an even voice, one that is not necessarily expressionless but carries no particular expression. Most words do not leap off the page. They sit firmly on the page. The reader looks at them, and they, so to speak, look right back at the reader, evenly and dispassionately. It is only when the reader's imagination begins to work on them that they acquire any distinctive tone. And it is you, the writer, who has to set the reader's imagination to work.In the majority of cases, you would not, of course, be limited simply to the four words we have been using as an example. As a writer, you may not be able to utilize tone of voice, body language, or action, but you can at least describe it:"How many are there?" he thundered/whispered/quavered/cooed. "How many are there?" she asked impatiently/impulsively/ingratiatingly. "How many are there?" they chorused, rushing to the window to see for themselves. Nevertheless, there are occasions when you want the reader to understand the feeling that underlies the words without having to be explicitly told what that feeling is. In order to do this, you have to impart a certain emotional coloring to what you write. You have to choose your words and structure your sentences in such a way that the reader knows immediately what feeling you intend to convey. This coloring is what is meant by "tone." Tone is feeling or attitude embedded in text.If we experiment a little, we will probably find that even a question as simple as the one we have been using as an example can be adjusted so as to convey a certain amount of tone. To put it another way, that we can usually embed a small amount of feeling or attitude in it:"How many would you say there are?" "How many are there, then, at a rough estimate?" "I don't want to know roughly, approximately, or a ballpark figure. I want to know precisely. How many there are?" As soon as we start to expand the question—in fact, as soon as we add quotation marks to indicate that the question is asked by somebody in the course of a conversational exchange—we begin to offer clues to the reader as to the tone of voice in which the words were spoken, and we prompt the reader to imagine the words being spoken in a particular way. A sensitive reader will register the fact that the way the first of the three examples above is phrased implies a relationship of some sort between the asker and the person to whom he or she poses the question. Most readers will easily perceive that the speaker in the third example asked the question in an irritated or peremptory tone and put the chief stress on the word precisely.But, as was said at the beginning of this section, tone in writing is not exactly the same as tone of voice. It is useful to be able to reproduce tone of voice if you are engaged in the kind of writing in which you put words into the mouths of characters. You should, as has been said several times before, always be aware of how the words you write would sound if they were read aloud. You should read passages over to yourself in "your mind's voice," and, consequently, the tone of your inner voice is likely to be reproduced to some extent on paper. Nevertheless, when we are making specific comparisons between tone in writing and tone of voice, we find ourselves concentrating on relatively short passages of text. When people speak, they do not usually go on for page after page after page. Somebody says something, somebody else replies or something happens, the person who spoke first then speaks again, and his or her tone may change from remark to remark. Writing often involves a much more extended effort. Tone in writing frequently does have to be sustained for page after page after page. As a result, tone in writing is generally something less variable, less nuanced, and less pronounced than tone of voice.If we were making a comparison with color, we would probably say that tone in writing often has to be fairly neutral. Precisely because writers and readers often have to "live with" pieces of writing for some considerable length of time, when we are discussing tone, we are more likely to be talking about shades of gray or pastel shades than about stark black and white or vivid red.Strong and Neutral TonesTone, it was suggested earlier, is "feeling or attitude embedded in text." It is, naturally, easiest to write in a particular tone if you happen to have the feeling that you wish to communicate at the time of writing. If you are angry or hurt and write from inside that feeling and simply allow that feeling to spill over onto the page, then you will obviously tend to write in an angry or injured tone:You are the most loathsome, disgusting reptile it has ever been my misfortune to meet. I would rather have dinner with an alligator in a swamp than accept any kind of invitation from you ever again. The reader or recipient is unlikely to mistake the way you are feeling if you write like that. Likewise, you might write,This has to be the most gripping thriller I have read this year. It was taut; it was electrifying. It kept me guessing till the very last moment. I literally could not put it down. Every time I tried to put it aside, I felt I was deserting the characters and leaving them to their fate. I just had to know whether they made it safely onto the next page. How does Julie manage to get under her readers' skin like that? Prose of this type is exciting to read and also exciting to write. But feelings tend to wax and wane. Like any other special effect in writing, a tone of venomous hatred or breathless enthusiasm may be difficult to sustain extensively. It is easy to imagine a person writing a blazingly angry letter, but less easy to imagine somebody writing a blazingly angry report. Rave reviews for books or plays appear quite often; a dissertation that maintains its enthusiasm at the level shown in the example above must be a rarity, and such a production would not necessarily be appreciated by its academic assessors.There are occasions when a writer feels the need to write with strong feeling and in a tone that adequately matches that feeling. He or she may even deliberately attempt to re-create such a feeling inside himself or herself, if it is not present at the time of writing, in order, for instance, to give authenticity to the words that a character says or to a description of that character's feelings. But more often than not, what is required is prose that does not wear its heart on its sleeve, prose that is fairly reticent and, as has been suggested before, does not call attention to itself but rather to the author's ideas or the information he or she wishes to communicate. Reasonably sober and reticent writing is not, therefore, necessarily toneless. It has tone of a different kind.Writers do not usually need to ask themselves, "How angry or how enthusiastic should I be about this?" More often, writers are likely to find themselves pondering questions such as "Should I adopt a formal or an informal style in writing to this person or on this subject?" or "Should I treat this subject seriously, or should I treat it lightly?" or "How can I appear to be moderate, sober, and responsible and still be lively enough to hold my readers' interest?" Such questions relate to attitude as much as to feeling, to the writer's attitude both toward the subject and toward the reader. They dictate the tone that the writer will try to maintain. They are not, however, irrelevant, even when there is a strong emotion underlying the writing. After all, instead ofThis has to be the most gripping thriller I have read this year. you could write,No other thriller that I have read this year has exerted such a powerful and tenacious hold on my imagination. orWow! Gripping? You bet! Thriller of the year? It gets my vote! The emotion and, therefore, the emotional tone remain the same in all three versions, but the level of formality and, therefore, the overall tone differ in each case.The question of what precisely is meant by terms such as formality and informality, together with the larger question of how you impart tone to your writing, will be dealt with in chapter 9. For the moment, having established what tone is and that it is often a quiet or subtle factor, let us concentrate on the factors that decide which tone you ought to adopt.These are simple: the circumstances and your readers. The force of circumstances barely requires discussing. You would not write the same kind of speech for a wedding as for a funeral; you would not write a letter of appreciation in the same tone as a letter of complaint. Specific kinds of writing are discussed in part II. So let us turn our attention to the reader, because the relationship between writer and reader is not always entirely straightforward.Writers and ReadersOne of the most often quoted maxims with regard to writing is "Know your reader." Now, in any particular instance, the relationship between writer and reader may be based on knowledge, but it may equally well, at least at the outset, be a relationship of mutual ignorance. You may be writing to a friend; you may be writing to somebody who is just a name on an advertisement or in the phone directory. You may be presenting your work to a group of colleagues; you may be writing for the vast, anonymous public at large. If you know who is going to read your work, your task is much simpler. On the basis of your social or professional acquaintance with the person or people involved, you should know roughly what tone to adopt with them, how polite or formal you need to be, whether you can afford to make attempts at humor, and so on.It is important to know your readers not only because you want to communicate with them appropriately and effectively—you do not want to offend them; you do not want to seem to be overestimating or underestimating their intelligence; you do perhaps want them to like what you have written and find it suitable, of appropriate, acceptable, or correct—but also because knowing them, to some degree, personalizes and thus facilitates the task of writing.The Lonely WriterWriters' magazines frequently print letters from their subscribers complaining about the loneliness of being a writer. There is the writer, shut away in a room, working at the computer or typewriter alone, often having no interaction with or feedback from the people he or she lives among, let alone the people he or she is writing for. Somewhere out there is the reader, perhaps shut away in another little room or going about his or her daily business, in any case, utterly oblivious of the writer's existence. The gulf between the two can seem enormous. A writer may feel that he or she is like a person sitting in front of a microphone in a radio studio sending messages out to receivers dotted at random across the city or countryside—except that the writer is never sure whether the microphone or the receivers are actually turned on.Under such circumstances, it is easy for writers to become discouraged. Most types of communication are two-way processes. Writing often seems as if it is all one way.But the writer who knows his or her reader does have a communications partner. He or she is not sending out messages into a void and so is probably less likely to feel alone and unloved and less likely to become disenchanted with the business of writing as a whole. It therefore makes sense to find out as much as you can about your potential readers, to ascertain their tastes, interests, and abilities, so that you can make them into full-fledged partners in communication and pitch your writing directly to them.Promotional writing, for instance, usually seems to start out from the assumption that readers respond more favorably to communications that are addressed to them as individuals and that take their personal preferences into account. There is an information-gathering industry at work collecting, or deducing, as many facts as it can about the habits, opinions, and lifestyles of sectors of the public so that organizations such as commercial companies and political parties can more effectively target potential buyers, voters, and so on. Much of the information acquired in this way is probably far less accurate and certainly less personal than it is sometimes made to appear. Some recipients may even be put off by the familiar tone adopted in some promotional literature and by its assumption that it knows even better than they do what they need or think. But the ordinary writer is not being asked here to buy into the ethos of promotional writing, simply to take note of the importance it attaches to collecting every scrap of information it can about the people on the other side of the gulf.Most ordinary writers will not have access to professionally gathered market research. Most ordinary writers can, however, conduct a certain amount of research into their readers' status and preferences and should seriously consider the merits of doing so. Let us repeat the points made before. To know your reader usually ensures that your writing will get a better reception; it also makes the task of writing easier.The Invisible ReaderIf, for whatever reason, it is impossible for you to find out anything about the actual reader who is most likely to peruse your work, then try to imagine an invisible reader—either the average or the ideal reader for your work, whichever suits your temperament better—and dedicate your writing to that person. An effort of the imagination is required, even when you do know your reader, because that real reader is not sitting in the room with you. If you can listen, as this book has often advocated, to your inner voice, it is perhaps not so difficult to conjure up an "inner reader" who responds to and comments on what you are writing.When, for example, you are putting the case for something, you will obviously wish to consider and deal with views that oppose your own. It is a relatively simple step to imagine a person who holds those opposing views with whom you are conducting a vigorous debate about the issue in question. You put forward an argument, the invisible reader or invisible debater—who is a skeptic if you are a believer, and a critic if you are an advocate—counters with an objection, which you should make as convincing as possible. This objection sparks off a further point on your side, and so the argument proceeds, and so, with luck, the piece starts to write itself.This kind of imaginary conversation need not be limited to writing with an adversarial element in it. It can be applied to most kinds of writing. You can imagine, for instance, that you are reading your poem or story aloud to an audience of the people you would most like to impress or appeal to.This technique does help. Engaging with an imaginary conversation or communications partner is often recommended as a method of getting your writing going and of keeping it going when you have problems putting down words on the page. For our immediate purposes, however, the main function of the invisible reader, like that of a real reader, is to guide you in your choice of tone and style and to help you stick consistently with that tone and style once you have chosen it.RelationshipLet us try to focus on the qualities in a real or an imagined reader that are going to affect your choice of tone and style. The first among these will be your relationship with the person you are writing to or for. Is he or she known to you? Is he or she a friend or colleague of yours?The closer the relationship between you and the reader, the easier it is to assess the kind of reception that your writing will meet with, and the fewer constraints there are on the way in which you write. You may write informally; you may use any kind of specialized or even private language as long as you are sure that it can be understood equally well by both of you; you will probably possess roughly the same range of reference on the basis of experiences you have shared in the past. Indeed, you probably will not have to worry much about choosing a tone, since a friendly or collegial tone will emerge naturally from the writing situation.But we need to generalize this discussion somewhat, for most people who are interested in style will be aiming at an audience beyond their immediate circle of acquaintances, and in any event, it is usually fairly obvious how you should go about addressing somebody you know. Let us assume that, as far as you are concerned, the wider world is composed of two types of people: peers and nonpeers. A peer is somebody who has the same status as you, somebody who is like you in most respects; a nonpeer is somebody who differs from you.Writing for Peers and NonpeersPeer-to-peer writing is probably the easiest kind of writing to accomplish apart from writing to somebody who is a personal acquaintance. When you write peer to peer, you can assume more or less that you are talking to yourself and do as you would be done by, adopting the kind of tone for your work that you would be happy to find in a similar work directed to you.It is when you are writing for a nonpeer that the choices become more difficult. When you are writing to a nonpeer, you are most likely to have to consider adjusting the way you write.First, however, you have to decide whether the reader you have in mind is a peer or a nonpeer. If you are an adult writing for other adults, you would assume you should write on a peer-to-peer basis. But suppose you were an adult female writing for a readership that consists mainly of adult males, or vice versa. Should you assume that difference in gender makes your likely readers nonpeers and adjust your style accordingly?That is quite a tricky question and possibly a contentious one, too. There are circumstances where a readership of one gender would appreciate being addressed by a person who comes across strongly as a member of the other. There are, equally, circumstances in which any consideration of gender differences would be considered inappropriate. It is this sort of factor that a writer may have to weigh. The sensible course in this particular case would usually be to start out on the assumption that you are writing peer to peer and adopt a determinedly neutral approach and style, while making sure, as always, that your range of references is suited to your readers. Do not, for instance, if you are a man, attempt to explain something to a general female readership using obscure sporting metaphors.Let us move on to less disputed ground. How should you proceed if you are a student writing for an instructor or an employee writing for your boss? Different people use different teaching and managerial styles, and consequently, there are different degrees of aloofness in relationships between teachers and their students and between managers and their staff. In many cases there will be no aloofness at all, and the relationship will be one of peer to peer. But if you regard the person you are writing for as senior to you, and that person tends to assume seniority, what course should you take?There is a perhaps natural tendency in most of us to express respect through greater carefulness in what we say. We do not wish to offend a person whom we do not know, particularly a person who is senior to us. We tend to think twice before inserting slang or colloquial expressions or jokes, whereas we would not hesitate to use them when writing to a friend. In short, we formalize our style and language. Formality is a gesture of respect.Informal or colloquial language, in fact, is often defined as the kind of language people use when communicating on easy terms with their friends and peers. When you start a letter with Dear George or Dear Friends or Hi, you will probably continue in something approximating the style of ordinary casual conversation. If you are communicating with people whom you do not know or who are senior to you in age or position, just as when you begin a letter Dear Ms. Wanamaker or Dear Sir or Madam, you expect to continue in "written" English and a more formal style.This instinctive tendency to heighten style when addressing a senior nonpeer is essentially a sound one. Nevertheless, the modern age is in most respects far less formal than its predecessors. People are less deferential than they used to be and also perhaps less conscious of their own dignity. The days when ladies and gentlemen seemed to owe it to themselves and to their readers and listeners to raise themselves on lofty stilts when holding forth on a subject are over. Language itself seems less deferential, and campaigns for simple English and for making official documents more accessible have tended to reduce people's acquaintance with the higher levels of vocabulary and style. Regular readers of academic journals still sometimes have to wrestle with obscure concepts and stylized prose, but the majority of us do not.This is essentially a good thing. But it has had the effect of making writers less familiar with formal language and style and so less able to use it confidently. Nevertheless, if people do not stand so much on their dignity, they still have it. They want to be respected and consequently want to be written to with respect, which is different from deference. It is of the utmost importance that writers should master a tone and style that is adequate for this purpose. In keeping with the spirit of the present age, however, this tone and style is better described as "neutral" than as formal. It is, in other words, a style that is not informal—it preserves a certain respectful distance between the writer and the reader—but at the same time it is not formal—it does not consciously strive to elevate itself and create greater distance either between writer and reader or between itself and the spoken language. This book, for instance, is written in a neutral style.The subject of the "neutral style," which, it should be noted, does not have to be defined solely by negatives, is further discussed in chapter 9. Let us now return to the subject of the writer-reader relationship.As Smart as You Are?We have been discussing the respect that a writer owes to certain categories of readers. There is one kind of respect, however, that the writer owes to all readers, which is best summed up as follows: Remember that your reader is as smart as you are.Most readers do not want to be deferred to; no reader wants to be condescended to. This is another tricky point. It is a common enough situation for a writer to possess information that he or she assumes the reader does not possess. The principal exception to this is a student writing an essay for a teacher. At whatever level the student ought usually to take for granted that the teacher is better informed on most subjects than he or she is. The main purpose of student writing is to demonstrate the student's ability to understand a subject; form personal, and hopefully interesting, opinions about it; and present those opinions in lively and literate prose. Outside the academic context, however, the purpose of writing is generally to inform and/or entertain. The writer has information to give and should assume at the outset that he or she understands the subject in question better than the reader does. Otherwise, what is the purpose of making demands on the reader's time and attention?This knowledge does not make the writer more intelligent than the reader, but it does mean that the writer is not always addressing the reader exactly as peer to peer. The writer, therefore, has to make allowances for the reader's lesser degree of understanding without seeming to imply that the reader is less intelligent than he or she is.It might appear that this has a great deal to do with the writer's attitude, and that the number of writers who actually start out with an attitude of arrogant superiority toward their readers is probably, and thankfully, small. But it also has something to do with the writer's choice and use of language. As long as a writer cultivates the qualities of style as defined in chapter 3 of this book—particularly clarity and simplicity—all should be well. If your writing is clear and simple, it stands to reason that it should be understandable to almost everybody. But, like all such qualities, clarity and simplicity can be to some degree relative and subjective. In particular, if you happen to be well versed in a subject because it is how you make your living or because you have researched it long and thoroughly, you may, almost unawares, have reached such a level of familiarity with it that what seems clear and straightforward to you is nevertheless Greek to the ordinary layperson.Here is a case in point. A student once took a vacation job in a small nursery where tomatoes and cucumbers were grown in greenhouses for the local market. One of the tasks he was asked to perform by the owner was to sort recently picked tomatoes. His instructions were to separate the tomatoes into pinks, pink and whites, and whites and to put the different kinds into separate boxes ready for delivery.The instructions seemed perfectly clear and simple to the student, and the owner must have assumed they were perfectly clear and simple as well, for he immediately left to attend to some other matter. When the student set about the task, he found that the task was not quite as straightforward as he had at first imagined. The vast majority of the tomatoes looked red or near-red, naturally enough, since they were about to be sent off for sale, and there were very few that looked pink and white, let alone white.Not wishing to appear stupid, because the instructions were, after all, very simple, and he was, after all, a college student and a pretty intelligent fellow, he did not set out to find the owner and ask for clarification but instead interpreted the instructions as meaning that he should sort the tomatoes into those that seemed ripe, those that seemed fairly ripe, and those that seemed fairly unripe. Since he was dealing with a fruit that began pale and got redder as it ripened, this seemed to be a not unreasonable way to proceed.Reasonable-seeming or not, it was totally wrong, as the student found out when the owner returned and immediately lambasted him for mixing up the pinks, pink and whites, and whites. The owner then demonstrated, as if for the benefit of a very slow-witted individual, the correct method of sorting tomatoes, which was by size. "These are your pinks," he said assembling a group of large tomatoes, "These are your pink and whites," assembling a group of medium-sized ones, and so on.As the somewhat mortified student began the task of resorting the whole delivery, he was left to reflect on the pitfalls that can be hidden in even the most apparently simple language. It was only later, and from somebody else, that he discovered that traditionally, large tomatoes had been wrapped in pink paper, medium-sized tomatoes in pink and white paper, and small tomatoes in white. Despite the fact that tomatoes were no longer individually wrapped, the color coding had stuck—at least in that nursery.There are, no doubt, lessons in life to be learned from that anecdote; there are certainly lessons to be learned about the use of language. The terminology that you use in your trade or profession may not be comprehensible to other people. And a technical term does not have to be a multisyllablic jawbreaker or borrowed from a foreign language to be incomprehensible. A simple everyday word can cause confusion if it is used in a specialized meaning with which the listener or reader is not familiar. Use your imagination. Writers usually expect to be told to use their imaginations to conjure up new and exciting ideas or visions, but it is equally important that they should use their imaginations to place themselves in their readers' shoes and avoid misunderstandings.Range of ReferenceWhen we are writing on a subject, we naturally tend to draw on our experience of life and the world to illustrate and explain our arguments. We may need a concrete example to support a general point we are making. If we do, we automatically delve into our memory to find an incident or an experience that fits the bill. Our experience also weaves itself into the way we use language in more subtle ways. If somebody took the trouble to analyze the metaphors and similes that we habitually use, that person might well be able to discover a great deal about who and what we are. You are less likely to say that you will leave somebody or something to "simmer slowly" if you know absolutely nothing about cooking; you are not likely to find British people saying that someone has to "step up to the plate," because most British people have never played or watched baseball.Our "range of reference," therefore, comprises those things from within our experience and knowledge that we draw on in our writing for purposes of illustration, explanation, and comparison. There is a common stock of experiences and knowledge that almost any person can reasonably be assumed to share. When we are writing for friends and peers, we can also assume a good deal of correspondence between their experience and our own. When we are writing for nonpeers, however, the situation may be different. Again, we should at one and the same time be cautious and imaginative—cautious in not making too many assumptions, imaginative in trying to empathize with the potential reader and in finding alternative and more generally understandable replacements for expressions that may not fall within his or her range of reference.Writing for ChildrenWe can perhaps best sum up the points made in this section on the writer-reader relationship by considering a case study: the art or business of writing for children. Writing for children is a specialty. There are authors who have made their names by writing children's books, and all other authors owe them a special debt for fostering the reading habit among the young and preparing the next generation of adult readers. At the same time, many ordinary writers will on occasion have to produce text that is suitable for young readers. To attempt to do so is a good test of an (adult) writer's ability to empathize with a nonpeer reader and, in particular, to write for people who may be essentially as smart as he or she is, but who do not have the same vocabulary at their disposal or anything like the same knowledge of the world and range of reference.You could, if you were so minded, practice making a text child-friendly by, for instance, taking definitions from a standard dictionary and reworking them. Here is the definition of the main sense of the word otter from the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:any of various largely aquatic carnivorous mammals (as genus Lutra or Enhydra) that are related to the weasels and minks and usu. have webbed and clawed feet and dark brown fur. The editors have thoughtfully provided a picture of an otter beside the definition.Now, there is nothing wrong with this definition as far as it goes. It is perfectly accurate and reasonably comprehensible to an adult, at least to an adult who is familiar with the ways of dictionaries. Dictionaries have to provide a great deal of information in a small space. They also have to try to be exhaustive. There are many kinds of otter, and they spend most but not all of their time in water. The desire for strict accuracy and considerations of space are like two opposing forces pulling in opposite directions. The solution to the problem is a use of language that employs few words but suggests manifold possibilities: "any of various largely aquatic carnivorous mammals …"But where else, outside a dictionary, would you find such a phrase? In order to solve their own problems, lexicographers have invented a style of their own, sometimes referred to as "dictionaryese," that the reader has to become familiar with if he or she is to get full value out of an indispensable work of reference. Those of us who use dictionaries become accustomed quickly to this unique way of conveying information. It is only, perhaps, when we stop to think what a child might make of such a string of words as "any of various largely aquatic carnivorous mammals" that we realize that it is not particularly easy to understand.Although the phrase does not contain any really very difficult words, its very compactness seems to aggravate the difficulty of the words that it does contain. It is like trying to swallow a very large mouthful all at once. The keyword, the noun, comes only at the end of the phrase and is plural (mammals), whereas an otter is singular, and we reach it only after negotiating the slightly obscure concepts any of various and largely aquatic. We soon realize that the former means that there are several different species or types of otter; and the latter, that otters spend a lot of their time in water, but do not live entirely in water. But would that be immediately obvious to a child? In this particular case, not until he or she was past the Latin terms in brackets would a child find any concrete information that is easy to visualize and relate to—assuming he or she knows what a mink and a weasel are.But the point of this discussion is not to take issue with Merriam-Webster's defining style, but to see how such a style could be adapted to make it more suitable for children. It needs to be simplified without becoming simplistic or inaccurate. It also needs to be "de-compacted," so that the younger reader does not have to deduce the relationship between a series of terms listed one after the other.There are dictionaries specifically designed for children already in existence. They work on these principles. Collins New School Dictionary, in its second edition, for instance, defines an otter like this:a small furry animal with a long tail. Otters swim well and eat fish. The Oxford School Dictionary, third edition, on the other hand, describes an otter asa fish-eating animal with webbed feet, a flat tail, and thick brown fur, living near water. It would seem apparent from these definitions that Collins has a rather younger reader in mind than does Oxford. Collins's vocabulary and construction are about as simple as they can possibly be. The definition is divided up into two separate sentences to avoid the problems of compacted word strings. The problem is that Collins has perhaps gone too far in simplifying the language of the definition and left us with an image of an otter as, possibly, a kind of aquatic, fish-eating mouse. Was the compiler possibly overeager to enter into what he or she assumed to be a child's way of seeing the world? Did he or she suppose that children lump together mice, hamsters, koalas, squirrels, chipmunks, and otters as "small furry animals" seeing only their common cuddliness and disregarding their other distinguishing features?Oxford's compiler does not make that mistake. He or she assumes that children will have no problem with the concept of a "fish-eating animal" and lists four defining characteristics in a businesslike way. (Oxford's otter, admittedly, must have interbred with a beaver to produce its "flat tail"!) Neither Oxford nor Collins, however, mentions the otter's body shape. An ideal definition would probably work on the same basic principles as those used in the two schools dictionaries cited but adding a little more of the information provided by Merriam-Webster, such as the following:an animal with a long slender body, short legs, webbed feet, thick fur, and a long tail that lives near water and spends a lot of time in it, hunting for its usual food, fish. Any readers who wish to try the same experiment for themselves might like to produce a child-oriented version of the following, Merriam-Webster's definition of the common colloquial verb phrase have it out:to settle a matter of contention by discussion or a fight. Compilers of dictionaries have special problems to contend with, but the same factors that sometimes make their definitions less than child-friendly could equally well appear in passages of ordinary writing:To anxious watchers on the ground it must have seemed inevitable that the balloon would enmesh itself in the branches of one of the tall trees crowning the crest of the ridge. Despite the balloonist's best efforts—for he was firing his gas jet in increasingly long bursts at decreasingly short intervals—the result of the unequal contest between gravity and hot air seemed a foregone conclusion. The expressions on the faces of the people in the basket were clearly visible. They mirrored and magnified the anxiety of those below. There is a case for saying that children who have reached a certain age and acquired some proficiency in reading enjoy coming to grips with an adult style, and they must, of course, at some stage make the transition to general, that is, adult-oriented, material. But a writer who was describing this same incident specifically for children would probably approach the task somewhat differently, avoiding, for instance, the slightly complex grammar of the first sentence with its "empty subject," it. Such a writer might also think about the point of view from which the passage is written. The verb phrase it must have seemed implies that somebody (the writer) is looking at the event from the outside and knows, in fact, what is going to happen. Concreteness is a virtue in most writing and particularly in writing for children. Since the people on the ground play an important part in the incident, it might make sense to describe it as they see it:The people on the ground could see that the balloon was getting lower and lower and thought it could no longer avoid getting tangled in the branches of the tall trees along the top of the ridge. They saw the spurt of flame and heard the hissing roar as the balloonist fired his gas jet. He was firing it in longer and longer bursts at shorter and shorter intervals. They knew he was getting worried. Concentrating on one point of view puts the reader more directly into the situation. For children, and perhaps for many other readers, involvement in the situation through sharing the view of one particular character or set of characters is more important than an overall view. It is also a fact that children often see things with startling clarity and in very literal terms. Although children enjoy fantasy and often enjoy stories where fantasy elements intrude into real life, when the subject is real life, they want genuine reality. It is unlikely that children would be able to grasp what the writer meant in the final sentence of the extract:They mirrored and magnified the anxiety of those below. The writer no doubt hoped that his or her readers would appreciate a neat and sophisticated way of saying that the riders in the balloon looked even more anxious than the watchers on the ground. But the phrase takes us a long way from real mirrors and real magnifying, and a child might well ask whether their faces were really magnified and how this could happen. As always, it is better to say what you mean rather than to translate your meaning into a fine phrase:The expressions on the faces of the people in the basket were clearly visible. Those people were very anxious indeed. Alternatively, you could return to the viewpoint of the people on the ground:They could clearly see the expressions on the faces of the people in the basket. Those people were terrified. As was said earlier, writing for children is a specialty. Books have been written on the subject. The purpose of this discussion has been to highlight some of the problems involved and to use these as an illustration of the general need for writers to think about their readers and to be prepared, when necessary, to enter sensitively into their readers' imaginative worlds. That does not mean you have to pretend to be a child in order to write for children. Unless you are very skillful and fully immersed in the thinking and language of childhood, children will quickly find you out. It does mean that you have to write clearly and simply and to be aware of possible restrictions on your readers' vocabulary and range of reference, but those are good rules for writing for any kind of reader.
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