Tone

The tone of your writing conveys your attitude to your reader, but how your attitude is interpreted can be very different from what you might have intended.

If there is anything anyone should remember about written communication it is that: anything said out loud sounds harsher when it's written down.

For example, if you tell someone verbally, "Good luck," it will most likely come across as you intended. However, if you write the same two words followed by a period, it can sound threatening, as in "Good luck." If followed by an exclamation point, the same two words can be read as having a sarcastic or condescending tone, as in "Good luck!"

When we say something out loud to someone right in front of us, the person we are speaking to has a wealth of contextual and non-verbal clues that help them gauge the tone of what we are saying. When we write something down, we are releasing our words into the wild, and leaving it up to anyone who reads what we wrote to interpret the tone we were trying to convey.

If - while reading what you wrote - someone were to think to themselves, "What are they trying to say?" it might mean that your tone was ambiguous. Depending on someone's mood, what they're going through, or their relationship with you; what you have written down may be interpreted exactly as you intended, but might also be interpreted however someone feels like interpreting it.

It's easy to blame this phenomenon on people being paranoid or oversensitive, but often it has to do with the process most of us use when communicating in writing. When we are writing to an individual or to a group, we often imagine ourselves speaking to them, in person, in a neutral setting, where everyone generally understands our meaning. You then end up writing what amounts to a transcript of what you would say in person, making the assumption that the tone you intend is the tone that will be received. This is a major mistake and can have disastrous consequences.

Let's say you were in charge of a project, and you wanted to send an email congratulating the team on reaching an important milestone. Let's say that you didn't know the members of the project that well and didn't really have a lot of insight into what they were going through. Let's also say that you are a very good public speaker, have a great sense of humor, and generally have no problem winning over a room of people you just met.

You sit down to write this congratulatory email and start off by saying how proud you were of the team, and how you know that everyone must be relieved after reaching the milestone. You then include a list of bullet points that have tips that worked for you in past projects, just as a way to help them along. You conclude your email with a joke that includes the phrase, "We all know there's never time to do it right, but always time to do it again" - a joke you've told before to a live audience that they found hilarious - and then end with, "Good luck hitting your next milestone."

You send the email, feeling pretty good about how you acknowledged the team's accomplishments, and pat yourself on the back for boosting their morale.

Shortly after sending the email, however, you start getting feedback that your email really upset the team, and that they felt disrespected and condescended to by your email.

They felt that your opening was nothing but meaningless platitudes, your list of bullet points was actually a list of everything they were doing wrong, that your joke was sarcastic and hurtful, and wishing them good luck was a thinly veiled threat. In a panic, you read your email again, trying to figure out what you did wrong, but for the life of you everything sounds great in your head, and you don't understand how the team could be upset.

What went wrong is that the email was written without any regard for how people would interpret its tone. The mistake was thinking of your written communication as simply a transcript of what you would have said in person, rather than a piece of writing whose tone is totally up to the reader to interpret.

As a professional, you should adopt a neutral tone in your writing - free of anything that could be mistaken as sarcasm, condescension, or disrespect - and use assertive language that unambiguously communicates your true meaning. As a general rule, the less room you leave open for the interpretation of your tone, the better.

Still, even when we try our best to adopt a neutral tone, there are still pitfalls that a lot of us fall into from time to time. These are phrases that seem polite and respectful but are often considered passive-aggressive. These phrases include, "I'd be most grateful if," "I hope you don't mind," "Sorry if I'm being unclear," "I hope this clarifies," and "Just a gentle reminder." Do your best to resist the temptation to use these phrases or any other - seemingly polite - phrases that might be interpreted as passive-aggression.

Another pitfall when people try to soften their tone in written communication is called the "Compliment Sandwich," where three paragraphs are written, with the first and last being compliments, but the middle paragraph being a criticism. This technique is used so often that people see right through it, and instead of the compliments softening the tone of the criticism, people tend to ignore the first and last paragraphs, and instead focus exclusively on the criticism.

Yet another pitfall is to try to use emojis to soften the tone of something you have written. Perhaps there was a time in the last few decades where this technique worked, but a fairly rigid guideline to follow in professional written communication is to never try to use emojis to soften tone.

If you send someone a text message ending with a smiley face emoji, depending on the person, the emoji may make the tone of the preceding phrase sarcastic and condescending, such that instead of saying, "I hope this helps," you instead say, "I hope this helps 😊" which can be read as patronizing.

Writing assertively, avoiding compliment sandwiches and passive-aggressive phrasing, and eliminating emojis will reduce the chance that your tone will be misinterpreted. If, despite your best efforts, your tone is still misinterpreted, you can be confident that you did everything you could to achieve a neutral tone, and that the reason your tone was misinterpreted is something beyond your control.