Feature Menu

Setting

The Relevance of Setting

Mood

Tone

Your Turn

How Is Setting Relevant to the Meaning of a Text?

Setting provides a background—a time period and place in which the action occurs.

Setting

Writers carefully select images and details to create a setting that draws us into the story.

• sight • hearing

the steady beat of the drum

the tart apple

three hot-air balloons colored the sky

• taste

Setting

• smell

gritty, wet sand between her toes

strong, sweet scent of a rose

• touch

Writers carefully select images and details to create a setting that draws us into the story.

Setting

Setting is not simply the place where the plot develops.

Writers create settings that are relevant, or important, to the meaning of a text.

The Relevance of Setting

Hong Kong

Sometimes the setting can create a conflict for the story’s characters.

The customs, or way of life, that the characters follow also are relevant to the meaning of the story.

The Relevance of Setting

Quick Check

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She looked across the sea of people as she made her way through the crowd.

The busy waterfront bustled with families eager to enjoy a day at the coast. Bouncing beach balls and colorful towels dotted the sunny boardwalk.

Which words in the passage help you imagine where the scene takes place?

Setting

Quick Check

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Soon-yi stared at the table. Her grandmother had decorated it carefully, taking great delight in the ancient green tea ceremony.

In the center of the table sat the steaming pot of tea, surrounded by delicate cups and saucers the color of pale green jade.

Everything was unfamiliar, alien to Soon-yi’s sense of what an American meal should be.

Setting

Which words that describe the setting help illustrate Soon-yi’s internal conflict?

stark

balmy

foggy

Mood is the overall atmosphere or effect of a work of literature.

A writer’s word choice and the story’s setting often create mood.

Mood

menacing

peacefulmysterious

What adjectives might you use to describe each of the moods illustrated below?

dark, foggy

warm breezes

ice and snow

Mood

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Tone is the writer’s attitude about a place or a character.

Tone

Writers reveal their tone by carefully choosing words that convey how they feel about a setting.

The cold stone of the tower seemed to hide frightening secrets.

The cold stone of the tower seemed to hide frightening secrets.

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Quick Check

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At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner.from “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

What mood is created by the details of this setting?

Mood and Tone

What tone does the writer use to describe the setting?

Analyze the relevance of the setting in a story you have read recently.

Describe the setting in a sentence or two.

Imagine if the story took place in a different setting—your own neighborhood, for example, or a different planet.

Record three significant ways in which the story would be affected by the change in setting.

Analyze Setting

Your Turn

Title: ______________________

Setting: ______________________

Alternate Setting: ______________________

Changes to Story:1. ____________________2. ____________________3. ____________________

Title: ______________________

The End