Email plug-in prevents you from sounding like a jerk

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s like a spell check for the angry – new technology can help prevent you from sounding like a jerk.

Email is infamous for lacking in external cues for the reader to clue in to the tone you’re trying to convey. If you’re excited, you could come across as angry or aggressive – and that cute, animated emoticon may not be enough to make up for it.

Matt Eldridge is the founder of ToneCheck, based in New Brunswick. He’s created a plug-in getting international attention by flagging words, phrases, punctuation and even emoticons that might convey the wrong tone.

But if you actually want to sound like a jerk, Eldridge says you can use it the other way around. “For somebody who is sort of meek and mild and doesn’t have a flavour for the language that you need in order to at least come across as agressive, then this tool will help you  in that fashion as well.”

ToneCheck was created after Eldridge lost too many sales in a previous job because of overly-intense sounding emails. “My tone would come across as agressive. I intended for it to be exciting and that was the emotion I was trying to portray but when people read it, they took it the wrong way.”

ToneCheck is still in beta testing, so it’s free for download at www.tonecheck.com. There is also an enterprise version for business, which is actually a “tone server” that sits behind a company’s firewall for added security and privacy.

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