Discovering Tone

My son, who is almost twelve years old, explained to me that writing can have a “tone” —  “You know,” he said, “like funny or serious. Sometimes it’s because of the punctuation and sometimes it’s because of other stuff.” He then invited me—“because you’re a writer and you’ll probably think this is neat”—to watch him pick out a paragraph from The Lightning Thief and type up his explanation of its tone for his homework.

Of course I watched.

And it was neat.