Tone is created in the mind of the reader--So read with your happiest voice!
Our first experience with language is listening. From the time we are born, we listen first. Then we start testing the waters of speech with babbling and then words and then sentences. Reading and writing come after that.
This matters because our first sense of tone, of how words create meaning and emotional resonance, is through other people’s voices.
Tone is in fact the judgment we make based on our experiences with hearing how people make the sounds of our language. We hear how their pitch changes, how their pacing slows or quickens, how the sounds rise and fall, connect together or separate, where they breath. And over time, we learn how the shape of the words tells us how they feel about what they are saying: are they happy? Mad? Disappointed? Excited? Anxious? Peaceful? We make the emotional conclusion based on what we hear. And throughout our lives, most of us get pretty good at figuring out someone’s emotional state based on what we hear in their voice.
Of course, we also watch people as they speak and learn to read their body language: facial expressions, gestures, posture, eye contact.
So, tone in conversation is incredibly rich because it has the entire body shaping the way the words come out and connect with an audience.
Writing doesn’t have that stuff.
Writing doesn’t have a body.
And because of that, it is very difficult for us to “hear” how the person means what they are saying.
For most of us, writing sounds flatter. The pitch doesn’t rise and fall very much. The pace is dependent on how we read, not on how the other person speaks. The volume only changes slightly with exclamation points or all caps or italics or parentheses.
Essentially, we have some tools to shape the way the reader hears our writing in their heads, but those tools are not as effective–they don’t give us a whole emotional range–as we have access to when we are speaking.
The result of this is that writing almost always sounds more negative than anything we would say.
And the other result is that the mood of the reader–how we are feeling that day, what experience we have with the writer, whether the writing itself is a slog or easy to read, all of the things that contribute to how we feel when we read affect the “tone” we hear in the other person’s email.
So when your coworker writes a message to you that they think is totally neutral: “The contract has been signed and is ready for your review.”
You might hear them being annoyed, passive aggressive, frustrated, or some other difficult feeling because you have some difficult feelings that day–either about the contract, or the coworker, or about something else entirely–that are affecting your perception of the language.
When we read emails at work, the tone we hear is usually the result of our own feelings as the reader rather than the actual content of the message.
What this means is that we need to practice thinking of messages at work as neutral. Everyone is just trying to do their jobs. They probably don’t mean to upset you or make your life difficult.
Writing is the last communication skill that we learn, so it is actually the one we have the least practice with in our lifetimes (Maybe that gap has shifted now that we communicate so much by text in our personal lives as well as all the writing at work, but we still talk to people and listen to people a lot–research from 1972 suggested that we spent 45% of our time listening and 9% writing. Even if we are writing more now, I think the gap is still significant.) Not everyone is a great writer, and our corporate environment has its own language that people start learning on the job–it’s different from the language they learned to write in school.
All of this is to say, your colleagues are probably not the best writers. And they certainly don’t have the skills to offset the negativity that so many of us read into writing–that’s a lot of work and education and training that most people in the workforce don’t get (unless they work with a communication expert like me 😀).
When their writing sounds “upset” or “angry” or “difficult” or “rude” or “mean” or whatever else, try to check in with yourself.
Is that true? Are they actually writing things that are mean? Here’s a mean version of the neutral sentence above:
The contract finally got signed even though you couldn’t get your act together to help us. Review it right now and make sure it meets everything we agreed on. If it doesn’t, you’re going to be directly responsible for any problems that come up.
That’s mean because it blames and threatens the reader. I could write one that’s even meaner, but we all know that swearing is inappropriate at work.
If the writer has simply written something that is neutral, you might be misreading it as mean because of your own circumstances.
Which means, you can hear it as positive if you change your own mental voice. If you are in a better mood, other people’s writing will sound more positive to you!
At the very least, give other people the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t know them, they are probably nice and trying to write a neutral message. Give them the benefit of the doubt. If you do know them, you know whether they are nice or not in person, assume that they intend to write in line with how you know them. Give them the benefit of the doubt.
Our work lives are tough enough. Let’s recognize that most people just aren’t effective writers at work because they haven’t been trained in that skill. (Most people aren’t good writers at work because most people are just imitating what everyone else writes at work–and none of the people writing are actually trained writers who know what they are doing.)
They aren’t trying to be mean. They just don’t know how to write nicer.
They are still a nice person. They are trying to write a clear, concise, and nice message.
Start assuming this and you will hear the tone change in your head, because that’s the reality:
Tone in writing is created in the mind of the reader.
You are responsible for how you hear other people’s writing.
So why not make it sound positive?