Explanation and information regarding tone tags (updated!)

Explanation and information regarding tone tags

Well, let's start from the basics, shall we?

(I know, I know. Is the explanation of tones really THAT important in the scheme of things? YES, yes it is. We have to remember that there are people who literally CANNOT understand tone and have to explain things. Also, people interpret tones in vastly different ways based on multiple subjective things)

What is tone?

Tone is what the Cambridge Dictionary defines as "a quality in the voice that expresses the speaker's feelings or thoughts". A more waffled definition (lol) to understand would be that tone is what the voice does to communicate how you feel. The tone of someone's voice can be joking, or serious; it can be teasing, or threatening. It can be negative, positive, or neutral; everything that we say and do comes across in some type of tone.

Tone is a very important communication tool and it is not just the way we speak that will bring out the tone of our sentences. Body language, facial expressions, voice inflections, etc are also important to how the tone can be perceived. Everyone communicates differently and not everyone can see/understand tones when communicating. It is key that everyone understands that not all people communicate the same and that when communicating online, we lose most of our signals for perceiving tone.

Tone can be especially difficult to parse for neurodivergent people. This isn't to say that neurotypical people don't misunderstand tone through text, or even face-to-face, but that neurodivergent people may experience and interpret tone differently from everyone else.

What are tone tags/indicators?

Tone tags, also known as tone indicators, are a way to communicate tone through text and through the internet. Miscommunication is rife on the internet so using indicators such as /j, /hj, /lh, and /s can be helpful to properly communicate what you are trying to say. It also helps so that people who don't necessarily need tone indicators won't also misinterpret your message.

Some examples of tone indicators are "/j", "/s", "/srs", "/p", "/r", "/ly", "neg", "pos", "/gen" and "/c". Though there are many others, these are the ones that are most commonly used and needed for clarity of communication.

Tone indicators are also not new at all! They have been used for a long time, such examples can be seen as early as Reddit where people started to commonly use /s (which means sarcastic). There are even examples in the past where people would change grammar to make it easier to understand what they are doing. There was a man named Henry Dunham, an English printer from the 1850s, who created the backward question mark so that people could see that he was asking a rhetorical question.