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Tone Exercise Analysis

Tags 📝 essay/written task
Date @April 4, 2023

📚 Courses 📙 SL English
Semester 2 (2023)

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📃 Description
First, once you have read both texts to assess what tone was used by the
writer to create the mood of the text; complete the table drawing on the
complex adjectives given in the box to assist you.
Second, find online a 'professional critique' of a book/movie/music album,
even an online game if you wish. Assess the language used: formal/informal;
simple or complex adjectives. Write a brief assessment of its merits after
annotation. (Upload to your student portfolio once done)
Lastly, choose one of the original texts to annotate; analyse then write an
introduction including the thesis statement plus one body paragraph on
"tone/mood'. Address the guiding question which states: In what ways does
the language of this text reflect its purpose?
Word count: 250-350

Tone Exercise Analysis 1

 📃 FIRST SUBTASK
Adjectives relevant to Text 1 only:

Biting, complacent, insidious, ironical, contemptuous, sarcastic, up-beat,

honest, cynical, tongue-in-cheek

Adjectives relevant to both Text 1 & 2:

Pendantic, earnest, demanding, instructional

Adjectives relevant to Text 2 only:

Accepting, innocent, submissive, obsequious, compliant, didactic

Tone Exercise Analysis 2

 📃 SECOND SUBTASK

MINECRAFT REVIEW
By Jaz McDougall published on December 25, 2011

Minecraft, as if you've never heard of it, as if we haven't been telling you to

play it for years, as if we didn't already give it Game of the Year in 2010, is a
game about building things out of blocks with your friends.

The game world is rendered in cubes, every one of which can be destroyed,
stored in your inventory, and placed back down anywhere you like. The map
generates more terrain as you explore in a new direction, almost infinitely
(you will run out of hard disk space at some point). That terrain is a quilt of
discrete environmental regions, or biomes: as you travel, the thick forest you
spawned in will give way to veldt or cliffs, or a desert peppered with cacti. You
might reach the ocean, or a marsh clogged with exploding monsters and lily
pads, or an ice floe leading to a wintry island.
Such random features as rivers, caves, waterfalls and ravines thread this
world. Herds of friendly, blocky animals graze happily here and there: pigs,
sheep, cows and chickens all provide useful products when slaughtered, and
they can even be kept and bred.
When the square sun sets, however, you need to worry. Whenever a given
tile is dark, a monster can spawn on it, and at night, there are hundreds of
them. They're a varied bunch. Spiders are low and wide, can climb vertical
surfaces, and tend to jump right in your face while hissing. Zombies are slow
melee oppressors, walking in a straight line towards you and able to hop over
short, one-block-high obstacles. Skeletons prefer to circle you and fire
arrows. Endermen are tall, teleporting nasties who only get angry when you
look at them. They're scattered infrequently throughout the night, and each
requires careful attention to dispatch when you're unarmed.

Creepers are the iconic, green, cactus-like Minecraft enemies that populate
fan art all over the internet. They have four stubby legs at the base of their
long, phallic bodies. They like to scuttle deftly towards you, hiss, inflate
alarmingly, then explode. The explosion deals significant damage, tearing a
great chunk out of the ground and any surrounding masonry. It doesn't

Tone Exercise Analysis 3

 happen often, but when it does, the impulse to rebuild – or perhaps improve –
is invigorating.
Crafting caters to that impulse. Crafting enables you to make new and
upgraded equipment. Once you've fashioned yourself a sword and some
armour, stabbing skeletons is a great way to while away the moonlight. With a
punchy iron sword, if you slice while falling through the air to score a critical
hit, there aren't many foes that won't drop in a few swings. Until then, you can
keep a few zombies at bay for a while, but all the teleporting and climbing and
shooting and exploding will get you one way or another. Better to keep
moving.
Better still, you could scrape together a mud hut with your bare hands and
avoid running into any monsters. Then again, it'll be dark in there and you
won't be able to tell when it's morning and, just, what the hell is wrong with
you? Cut down trees! Make a log cabin! Sing hearty songs! Grow a beard!
Then go outside anyway and punch skeletons until dawn! Endermen,
skeletons, and zombies all catch fire and die in the morning light, while
spiders who aren't already chasing you become docile. Creepers still try to
explode at you, but for the most part, the danger is over at sunrise. Only
where it's still dark, deep in caves and under rocky overhangs, are monsters
alive and deadly during the day.

Before you're ready to start fighting, the first thing you'll make is a wooden
pickaxe. It lets you harvest stone, which you can use to make stone tools,
masonry and furniture. For a new player, it's a steep learning curve if you
don't know about the crafting recipe page on the Minecraft wiki . This is an
issue that the developers, Mojang, have been slow to address, even as they
crest four million sales.

But I can't stay mad at it. Minecraft is a phenomenally important game for the
PC. The appeal is vaster than the objects I've built in it. You can build
anything you can imagine, and it's vastly more functional than you first
realise. Waterfalls are just the beginning. You can craft pistons that shift
blocks back and forth. You can harvest a curious red dust that functions like
electrical wire – and you can lay it out in the shape of functioning circuits.
That means logic gates. That means computation. There are computer
science students who have built functioning CPUs in Minecraft, and some

Tone Exercise Analysis 4

 have even developed rudimentary computer games to run on these
computers of dust and dirt.

Even you and I can easily wire a series of traps and security doors and secret
panels. Crucially, you're learning real electronics when you do this – it's not
some abstract skill that won't help you in real life. I know what an RSNOR
latch is. Do you? No? Play Minecraft!

Again, you'll have to make use of the community tutorials to master most of
this stuff, but my point is: this is a game where you can spend a few months
happily perfecting a lightswitch, and still know nothing about potions, or
breeding animals, or fighting, or exploring alternate dimensions, or
enchanting, or designing integrated rail networks.

It's a good job there's a robust multiplayer, then. If you rent a server, you can
invite lots of friends to come and help you build, and this is where the majesty
of Minecraft becomes undeniable. Most of the servers I've visited have been
teeming with massive, painstaking projects, recreating whole cities from
Pokémon and Studio Ghibli films. But the most rewarding experiences I've
had on Minecraft servers were those where I got to team up with a few
passionate builders on the same project. As each builder gravitated towards
their areas of aptitude, I began to feel more like part of a team than I ever had
in a game of Team Fortress 2. I was the wiring guy. I had this skill that nobody
else could fathom. I built a wall that could automatically rebuild itself, forever. I
built a secret door in a fountain, where the water drained away carefully
before the plinth slid apart to reveal a long descent of stairs. By Googling
liberally, following greater Minecraft architects than I, and being creative in
how I implemented what I found, I could achieve wonders.

Many multiplayer games, even our favourites, offer nothing more than friendly
feet shuffling alongside us. In Minecraft, each of us is a god, toiling to emboss
ourselves upon the world. Other players aren't just helping you kill things and
healing you, they're carving out mountains for the secret base you're making
with them, pouring waterfalls off your floating fortress to give you a safe way
down, or carrying buckets of lava underground to help you make a sauna.
I played World of Warcraft for years, and now that I think about it, I didn't
really enjoy any of it. I've been playing Minecraft in alpha or beta for over two
years, and every piece of the game that's clicked into place has utterly

Tone Exercise Analysis 5

 reinvented it. There's so much left for me to do. I haven't built a skull
mountain yet. I haven't finished my terraced farm with my brother. I've hardly
ever played with minecarts and tracks and switches and pressure plates. I
can barely fit in all the creative, arty, sexy things I want to do.

But it's not just a fun old game with lots of hours-divided-by-money-equals-
value. It's an exciting and important direction for games to be walking in.
Look, no tits! No guns! Parents can buy it for children, and leave them playing
it safely! Women won't run into horrid stereotypes of themselves wearing
armoured thongs! Teachers can teach it in schools! Deus Ex, up at a score of
95, made me think: “What if more shooters were like this?” Minecraft locks
me in hour-long paralysis as ideas course through me. If Doom spawned the
FPS industry, what the hell will the fruit of Minecraft's cubic womb be? Has
the future of PC gaming ever looked so good, before we saw it from the top of
this big blocky mountain?

I showed the game to my nineyear- old cousin and her six-year-old sister, and
there was a period of stunned silence, followed by a din of suggestions and
pleas and queries. My parents get it. My grandparents get it. People burnt out
on WoW get it, people tired of shooting men get it. Almost everyone gets it.
And you should get it too.

My Assessment & Tone Analysis

The critique is a positive rating or criticism about the decade old video game,
Minecraft, highlighting its imaginative open world, varying biomes, and unique
monsters. It also compliments the game's crafting system, which enables
players to build new tools and equipment that help in their survival in the
game world.

The author values the game's ability to encourage creativity as well as the
wide range of things that can be made within it, such as functioning circuits
and even CPUs. The author also emphasizes the value of community lessons
and the robust multiplayer feature, which enables players to share their
gameplay experience. The critique concludes that Minecraft is a
phenomenally noteworthy open-world survival game that is well worth
playing.

Tone Exercise Analysis 6

 This critique’s language is mostly informal, with a conversational tone and
dialect sentences like "what the hell is wrong with you?" and "while away the
moonlight." Most of the adjectives are simple yet explicit, such as "blocky
animals," "significant damage," and "curious red dust." However, complicated
terms such as "rudimentary computer games" and "discrete environmental
regions" are used.
The informal tone and use of slang words create an atmosphere of thrill and
pleasant that is suitable for a game review. The use of descriptive language
and basic words adds to the text's accessibility and readability. On the other
hand, the use of complicated words and academic phrases serves to add
depth and detail to the review, showing the author's high level of knowledge
and expertise on the topic.

Tone Exercise Analysis 7

 📃 THIRD SUBTASK

TEXT 1 - Why I Want A Wife by Judy Brady

I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not
altogether incidentally, I am a mother.
Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a
recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is
looking for another wife. As I thought about him while I was ironing one
evening, it
suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife. Why do I want
a
wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically
independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon
me. I
want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I am going to
school
I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a wife to keep track of the
children’s doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too. I
want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want
a wife who
will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a
good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling,
makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes
them to
the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes care of the children when they
are
sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need special care,
because, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My wife must arrange to
lose
time at work and not lose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife’s income
from time to time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will
arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working.

Tone Exercise Analysis 8

 I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a
wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to
explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies.
And I
want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.

I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When my wife
and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of the
babysitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want
to
entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special
meal,
serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about things that
interest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the
children
are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not
bother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that
they feel
comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed
the
hors d’oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their
wine
glasses are replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them
as they
like it. And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by
myself

I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love
passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am
satisfied.And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention
when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete
responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a
wife who will remain
sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life
with
jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may
entail

Tone Exercise Analysis 9

 more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to
people as fully as possible.
If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I
already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one.
Naturally, I will expect a fresh new life; my wife will take the children and be
solely responsible for them so that I am left free.
When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit working
and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care
of a wife’s duties.
My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?

Text Analysis
The author’s use of satirical and ironic tone in the strong adjectives implies
the extreme standards, expectations and gender roles placed on women,
specifically to wives. Other than that, the use of repetition of “I want a wife”
addresses the inequalities and unfair demands that men treated in their
relationships, with the author’s goal to take attention to the change for gender
equality and society’s expectations.
The text's sarcastic and absurd tone helps to make the audience aware of the
inequality women face during marriage and the need for social standards to
change. Brady's use of repeat and specific cases of what men want from their
partners tensions the unfair and unreasonable demands put on women,
raising awareness among the audience about the need to question and
change these gender roles.

The tone of the text highlights the absurdity of wifely standards in the 1970s.
The author's use of skepticism and irony is evident in the repeated use of the
phrase "I want a wife." The phrase means to the unfair and unreasonable
demands that are placed on women, such as the expectation that they be the
primary caregiver for their children, handle the home, and be readily available
to their partners. The use of irony creates an atmosphere of displeasure and
irritation, and the sarcastic tone reflects the author's goal of displaying how
society views about women's obligations in marriage.
Ultimately, Judy Brady's "Why I Want a Wife" is an ironic essay that reveals
the unrealistic demands put on wives in the 1970s. The use of sarcasm and

Tone Exercise Analysis 10

 irony by the author produces a tone of frustration and tongue-in-cheek, which
represents the purpose of the text. The author urges readers to question the
society’s standards in the topic of gender roles and to battle against women's
oppression.

Tone Exercise Analysis 11