Author's Attitude as Revealed by Tone and Language
What you must be able to do
Infer the author's stance from word choice, concessions, emphasis, and the company the author keeps - and calibrate its intensity precisely.
Concepts to master
- Adjectives and adverbs carry the load. Striking, puzzling, crude, ingenious, long overdue each place the author on a scale. So do small qualifiers: merely, allegedly, ostensibly, admittedly.
- Scale of stance. From strongest to weakest: advocacy, qualified endorsement, neutral report, skepticism, dismissal. Most correct answers sit at qualified endorsement or skepticism rather than at the extremes.
- Concession as attitude. An author who concedes a point is usually partially sympathetic; an author who concedes and then buries the point is not.
- Whose attitude? Passages frequently report a sharp view held by a critic while the author stays neutral. Answer choices that import the critic's heat are wrong.
- Irony and quotation marks signal distance without outright disagreement.
Traps
Overstating mild approval as championing, reading criticism into neutral exposition, missing irony, and attributing a quoted figure's tone to the author.
Rule of thumb and worked example
Find the single sentence that most reveals evaluation and underline its evaluative words; let those words set both the direction and the strength of your answer.
Example: the author calls a study "careful and, within its limits, convincing." The phrase signals qualified approval. "Enthusiastic endorsement" overstates; "grudging skepticism" reverses the direction; "cautious acceptance" fits. Note how within its limits does the work of restraint.