Tone and mood both deal with the emotions centered around a piece of writing. Though they seem similar and can in fact be related causally, they are in fact quite different.

Tone

Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject (or toward the audience). How he/she feel about the fragment of life displayed in the story. A writer's tone can be serious, playful, sarcastic, objective, detached, confessional, satirical, matter-of-fact, bemused, outraged…

Writers mainly create their tone through their diction (the words they use). Tone is also set by the setting, choice of vocabulary, etc. While journalistic writing theoretically has a tone of distance and objectivity, all other writing can have various tones. If we were to read a description of a first date that included words and phrases like “dreaded” and “my buddies forced me to go on the date”, we could assume that the individual didn’t really enjoy the date. Tone is the author’s attitude toward his characters, the situation and the readers. A work of writing can have more than one tone. An example of tone could be both serious and humorous. The tone can change through a text.

Mood

is the general atmosphere/feeling a piece of literature arouses in the reader: happy, sad, peaceful, etc. Mood is the overall feeling of the piece, or passage. By choosing certain words rather than others and by weaving their connotations together, an author can give whole settings and scenes a kind of personality, or mood. Note the difference if he/she describes a tall, thin tree as "erect like a steeple", "spiked like a witch's hat" or "rather inclining toward the slim". However, no single image can work alone; mood can only arise from a steady pressure in the language toward one major atmospheric effect. That effect should support the main purpose of the story. Mood is the general atmosphere created by the author’s words. It is the feeling the reader gets from reading those words.

Writers use many devices to create mood, including images, dialogue, setting, and plot. Often a writer creates a mood at the beginning of the story and continues it to the end. However, sometimes the mood changes because of the plot or changes in characters.