The feeling and the point

Word	What it means
Mood	The feeling a passage creates in the reader: tense, peaceful, lonely, cheerful.
Tone	The writer's or narrator's attitude toward the subject: amused, admiring, fond, bitter.
Word choice	The particular words a writer picks.
Connotation	The feeling a word carries beyond its dictionary meaning. Slender and skinny mean nearly the same thing and feel different.
Figurative language	Words that mean more than they literally say, usually through a comparison.
Simile / metaphor	A comparison using like or as / a comparison that says one thing is another.
Personification	Giving human actions or feelings to something that is not human.
Hyperbole	Deliberate exaggeration that nobody is meant to believe: I've told you a million times.
Topic	What a text is about, in a word or two: courage, family, change.
Main idea	The point a text makes about its own subject: what this story or passage is about.
Theme	What a story suggests about life or people in general, written as a complete sentence.
Moral	A lesson stated as a rule, with always, never or should. Usually too simple to be a theme.

The gym was empty after the game. The lights buzzed overhead, a lost water bottle rolled slowly across the floor, and somewhere down the hall a door clicked shut.

The gym was empty after the game. Streamers still hung from the railings, the scoreboard glowed 58–56, and somewhere down the hall the team was still singing.

A model reading. Same place, same first sentence, opposite moods. The first is lonely and a little eerie: buzzed, lost, slowly and a door that clicked shut are small sounds you only notice in silence. The second is warm and triumphant: streamers, a score that glowed, a team still singing. Neither says how to feel. The details do it.

Dad announced that we would make great time. We made great time as far as Drumheller, where the van made a noise like a blender full of forks, and then we made no time at all.

Tone is the narrator's attitude, and here it is amused: repeating made great time turns Dad's promise into a joke, and a blender full of forks is funny, not frightening. Told bitterly — “Of course the van broke down. It always does.” — the same breakdown would feel different to read. That is how tone shapes mood.

They can pull apart. A narrator who describes a bear walking through camp in a calm, matter-of-fact tone can make the mood more tense, not less: the reader does the worrying the narrator will not.

By the third hour of the drive to Grandma's, the prairie had become one field repeated forever. My little brother asked if we were there yet about four thousand times. The sun sat on the dashboard like a cat that refused to move, and somewhere past Brooks the air conditioner wheezed, coughed and gave up.

• Hyperbole: one field repeated forever and about four thousand times. Nobody counted. The exaggeration shows how bored the narrator is — and because nobody could take it literally, it also shows the narrator is joking.
• Simile: the sun is like a cat that refused to move: warm, heavy and impossible to shift.
• Personification: the air conditioner wheezed, coughed and gave up, like someone worn out.
• Together: the tone is a comic complaint, so the mood is fun, not misery. The hyperbole is the clue that nothing truly terrible is happening.

Hyperbole is meant to be noticed. “This backpack weighs a ton” is not a lie, because nobody would believe it. Ask what feeling is being exaggerated.

Not every comparison is figurative. “Priya is as tall as her mother” is a plain fact. A simile compares two unlike things — the sun and a cat — to show something about one of them.

Owen wrote out his Remembrance Day speech word for word and practised reading it until every sentence was perfect. At the microphone, the pages slid off the stand and scattered across the gym floor. For a long moment nobody moved. Then Owen looked up and, without any paper, told the school about his great-grandfather's letters home from the war — not the speech he had written, but the part he actually cared about. Afterward, three teachers asked him for a copy of a speech that did not exist.

Level	For Owen's story
Topic	Public speaking; remembering
Main idea	When Owen loses his notes, his unplanned speech moves people more than his written one could have.
Theme	Speaking honestly about what matters to you can reach people more than a perfect performance.

• “Courage.” — a topic. It names a subject and says nothing about it.
• “Owen drops his speech but gives a better one.” — a summary. A theme is about people, not one character.
• “Always keep a spare copy of your notes.” — a moral, and not the story's point: losing the notes is what made the speech good.

A test. Replace the character's name with “people”. If the sentence still makes sense, and the ending supports it, it is a theme. Here the ending is the proof: three teachers asking for a speech that does not exist.

• Mixing up mood and tone. The reader's feeling; the speaker's attitude.
• Naming a device without saying what it adds.
• Taking hyperbole literally, or calling any big number hyperbole. A real measurement is not an exaggeration.
• A theme in one word, or a summary of the plot.
• A moral with always, never or should that the story does not support.