The tone of an email decides whether it gets a warm reply, an annoyed one, or none at all — and writers are notoriously bad at judging their own. A request you meant as friendly can read as demanding; a careful, polite note can hedge so heavily the actual ask disappears. This checker analyses your draft in the browser across four dimensions and flags the specific phrases pulling your tone off target, so you can fix them before you hit send.
How it works
You paste your draft and pick the intended tone (friendly, neutral-professional, or firm). The checker scores the text on four axes using transparent linguistic signals. Warmth rises with greetings, gratitude, and personal words and falls with curt phrasing. Assertiveness rises with direct requests and falls with hedging like “just,” “maybe,” and “if possible.” Clarity rewards short sentences and clear asks and penalises walls of text. Politeness tracks softeners and courtesy markers against demanding language and exclamation overload. It then flags individual phrases — over-hedging, accidental bluntness, run-on sentences — and offers concrete rewrites. All of this runs locally; the email is never uploaded or stored.
The four dimensions in detail
Warmth
Warmth signals signal that you see the recipient as a person, not a task. The checklist looks for greetings by name, expressions of genuine thanks, personal acknowledgments (“I hope the launch went well”), and collaborative framing (“let’s figure out”). Low warmth is usually not hostile — it is just absent. Adding one sentence of genuine acknowledgment at the start typically raises warmth significantly without making the email longer.
Assertiveness
The most common tone problem in professional email is under-assertiveness: burying the real ask in qualifications. “I was just wondering if you might possibly be able to…” signals that the writer expects refusal. A direct request (“Could you send the report by Friday?”) respects both parties’ time. The checker flags hedging clusters — sequences of “just,” “maybe,” “if possible,” “I think” — as assertiveness penalties.
Clarity
Clarity is whether a busy person who reads your email once knows exactly what you want and by when. The checker penalises long sentences (over roughly 30 words), paragraphs with no clear action sentence, and requests that are buried in the middle of a paragraph rather than given their own sentence. If you get a low clarity score, restructure so the ask is in its own sentence and the deadline is explicit.
Politeness
Politeness tracks courtesy markers (please, thank you, apologies) against signs of demand (exclamation marks after requests, commanding imperatives without softeners, sarcasm markers). The key balance: politeness should not undermine assertiveness. “Please could you send this by Friday?” is both polite and direct. “I would be so incredibly grateful if at some point you could possibly…” is polite but has lost the ask entirely.
Common fixes
| Problem | Typical fix |
|---|---|
| Over-hedging | Remove “just” and “possibly” from around your main request |
| Buried ask | Move the request to its own sentence near the top |
| Low warmth | Add one acknowledgment sentence at the start |
| Run-on sentence | Split at the conjunction |
| Exclamation overload | Keep one per email maximum |
Tips and examples
Set the intended tone honestly: a firm escalation should score high on assertiveness and lower on hedging, while a thank-you note should lean warm. Watch the gap between politeness and assertiveness — many drafts are polite but so hedged that the recipient cannot tell what you actually want; trim the softeners around the one sentence that carries your request. If clarity scores low, the usual culprit is a single 40-word sentence; split it. Use the checker as a fast first pass, then paste the email into an LLM only when you want a full nuanced rewrite — most drafts just need the two or three flagged phrases fixed.