Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Name______Period______

Appreciating Tone The tone of a piece of writing is the frame of mind and mood that it conveys to readers. Comparable to a speaker’s tone of voice, it reveals the writer’s attitude toward the audience and the material. Conveyed through words, choice of details, sentence structure, punctuation, sensory images, and figurative language, tone cane express anger, fear, sarcasm, pleasure, or any other human emotion or characteristics.

The tone of your writing should grow out of your purpose and you choice of audience. When your purpose is to inform or persuade, an objective, formal tone with serious language will probably be appropriate. On the other hand, you may want to approach your audience on a more casual level, incorporating more conversational language, personal pronouns, contractions, and slang. Whatever your choice of purpose and audience, keep in mind that an appropriate, consistent tone gives your readers clues about your feelings toward your material. This, in turn, helps them understand what you have to say.

Exercise A-Identify Tone: Briefly describe the tone of each of the following passages, and explain the effect that is created.

1. Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards Hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock.

2. O sinners! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide bottomless pit, full of fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in Hell.

3. Those of you that finally continue in a natural condition that shall keep you out of Hell longest will be there in a little time! Your damnation does not slumber; it will come swiftly, and, in all probability, very suddenly upon many of you. You have reason to wonder that you are not already in Hell.

Exercise B- Experimenting with Tone: Rewrite the following sentence in the two tones listed below. You may use more than one sentence if necessary to communicate your tone and meaning more effectively.

Car insurance rates have increased tremendously over the past several years.

1. annoyed:

2. innocent: Recognizing Persuasive Techniques Persuasion is the strategic use of language to move an audience to action or belief. In persuasive writing, writers can move readers by appealing to their reason, their emotions, and/or their sense of right or wrong. The effectiveness of a persuasive appeal depends on the writer’s choice of persuasive techniques and on how well these techniques are used. Edwards’s masterful appeal to his audience’s emotions gave his sermon its great impact.

A. In the following passage from Edwards’s sermon, underline the words and phrases that appeal to emotion.

“When God beholds the ineffable extremity of your case, and sees your torment to be vastly

disproportioned to your strength, and sees how your poor soul is crushed, and sinks down, as it were, in

infinite gloom…”

B. Each of the following passages from Edward’s sermon appeals to emotion. Rewrite each passage so that it appeals to reason. a. “The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation: let everyone fly out of Sodom.”

b. “Many are daily coming from the east, west, north, and south: many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood…”

Understanding Figurative Language To build powerful images, writers use figurative language which links together seemingly unrelated ideas into a single, coherent expression of meaning.

Similes make comparisons using the word like or as: I wandered lonely as a cloud Metaphors make comparisons without using like or as: Personification gives human qualities to nonhuman subjects: Exhales an air in every grove and heath

Identify the figure of speech in each passage.

______1. “Hell’s wide open mouth gaping open”

______2. “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead”

______3. “…would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of Hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock.”

______4. “The wrath of God is like great waters that are damned for the present…”

______5. “and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow…”