First spell check, then grammar check – now tone check?

Email is an integral part of our business lives, but it’s also a liability. Sometimes a simple attempt at being brief and concise can make you come across as curt and unpleasant. It’s far too easy to be overconfident about conveying tone effectively in email, and there’s no shortage of ‘when email attacks’ stories in the press.

Once downloaded, ToneCheck lurks below your emails as you compose them, and warns you – via five red bars of Tone Alert – if your tone is entering the danger zone. The phrases that ‘could be perceived as negative’ by a reader are picked out and deemed ‘concerning’, ‘upsetting’, ‘humiliating’ or ‘aggressive’.

Anyone who’s used a spelling or grammar checker will know they are far from infallible – and surely the subtleties of tone will be even tougher to put into an algorithm. Yes, it’s a great idea. But does it work?

In Lymbix’s marketing materials, a screenshot shows an email transformed from the ‘aggressive’ (‘what’s wrong that you can’t close any of these deals?’) to the acceptable (‘these deals really should be closing themselves’). Looks promising – that’s a relationship saved, surely?

In real use, the choice of words and phrases that provoke the alert bars can be amusing or just plain mystifying. ToneCheck took great exception to the terms and conditions in the Emphasis signature (even our very name – Emphasis Training Limited – is ‘upsetting’, apparently).

What’s the thinking behind ToneCheck?

The raw data for ToneCheck’s sentiment analysis is gathered from volunteers who join ToneADay, a website where short phrases are rated for their emotional effect. On the ToneADay site you can scroll through recent ratings – though be warned that it’s an occasionally surreal experience that might make you question the approach.

How, for example, is ‘get rid of baby’ ‘positive’? Other phrases also deemed ‘positive’ – ‘longer acceptable’ and ‘marriage alone’ – could easily be part of less-than-upbeat sentences (‘Your attitude is no longer acceptable’; ‘marriage alone isn’t enough reason for us to stay together’). Can tone really be accurately judged without context?

Chief Operating Officer at Lymbix Bob Huggard assures us that these ratings are moderated; and that on top of this ‘raw emotive context input’ there is ‘a sophisticated layer of statistics and NLP [Neuro-linguistic programming]’. But is it sophisticated enough to cope with context? After all, surely the only reason the program took a dislike to ‘no problem’ was because it ignored the (rather pivotal) ‘no’.

ToneCheck still has a way to go. And on this front, the people at Lymbix are perhaps to be commended – they still treat it as a work in progress. ‘The system is always learning,’ says Huggard. ‘We can identify what we don’t know, and send it through the ToneADay process to collect the raw input. Also the new ToneCheck products allow the user to flag errors so we can correct [them].’

In the meantime, ToneCheck’s biggest recommendation may just be the placebo effect. If merely having it on your screen makes you more likely to slow down and be more careful about your phrasing, that’s already some sort of a success. But at this stage, just like spelling and grammar checkers, it’s no replacement for common sense (or a second pair of eyes).

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Author: Catie Holdridge

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Catie joined Emphasis with an English literature and creative writing degree and a keen interest in what makes language work. Having researched, written, commissioned and edited dozens of articles for the Emphasis blog, she now knows more about the intricacies of effective professional writing than she ever thought possible.

She produced and co-wrote our online training programme, The Complete Business Writer, and these days oversees all the Emphasis marketing efforts. And she keeps office repartee at a suitably literary level.