Take two is written by Robert Love, award-winning journalist & Founding Partner of FMC
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How to avoid the wrong email tone
The Simpsons offered one of the best assessments of the personal improvement industry almost twenty years ago when Troy McClure promoted a self-help video titled “Get Confident, Stupid.” Yet, despite significant ongoing changes to the communications landscape, this movement continues to do an astonishing level of business. Indeed, Marketdata estimates the various holistic institutes, self-help books, CDs, motivation-speaker seminars, personal coaching courses, weight-loss and stress-management programmes are worth in excess of €8.5 billion annually in the US alone. Now, a new computer programme called ToneCheck is bringing the concept of self-help to your personal and business email.
The idea behind ToneCheck is that those who regularly use email for work purposes need a facility – much like Spell Check – to ensure colleagues don’t interpret an e-mail the wrong way. The ToneCheck website warns “words are loaded weapons.” It also quotes a 2006 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study which (apparently)found that e-mail messages are interpreted incorrectly 50% of the time. ToneCheck runs through an email before the ‘send’ button is pressed to help ensure the intended tone is clearly communicated and understood. It evaluates words and phrases for the intensity of eight primary emotions, allowing the user to make corrections and adjust the overall tone before sending the ‘wrong’ message.
ToneCheck may have been created by Lymbix, an award-winning Canadian technology innovation company, but it’s wonderfully ludicrous. If you’re so unsure of your written communications skills that you need to add this icon to your document creation page, perhaps you shouldn’t be anywhere near a keyboard? Indeed, anyone adding the icon to their document creation page will instantly negate the key advantage of email by making the entire e-communication process endlessly time-consuming. That said, given the nature of the self-help movement, it will probably sell like hot-cakes. Test it out for yourself here.
