I think we need to be very careful when we talk about tone in text-based communication. One of the worst things about this new world of text-borne communication is that we lose most of what makes a conversation. There is no tone, there is no body language, there is no inflection.
So how can we truly judge the tone of a comment without inferring details? People today /seem/ to be so ready to disagree, so ready to argue, so on the edge when it comes to opinions, that even objective discussions and comments are taken as personal slights and overlaid with reader inferred malintent.
It's the reason why /I believe/ that people who argue on the internet would otherwise get on with each other in person.
That is why it's important to be mindful of what we are writing, trying to not write things that might be misinterpreted.
Not think, tone can't be inferred from writing so I'm just going to write whatever I want if someone does not like it it's their problem.
It's our problem too to care about the tone of what we write and think about how it's going to come across to other people, and not have this illusion that there is no tone in writing.
Assuming objective tone interpretability seems like a leap.
Some people are Shakespeare with words. Others, especially those for whom English is a second+ language, may not have such a nuanced box of crayons to work with.
So one person's intended offense may simply be another's obliviousness to the particulars of their chosen phrase.
It'd be better if everyone wrote with care, sure; but I'm not ready to hold everyone accountable for premeditated tone violations.
And its because written tone is so easily misinterpreted that is important to be careful. It's not just about the intention, its also about the objective end result.
Sure, you might not have intended to run over someone with a car, but that person is still dead. Not everything is about intentions, consequences count too.
Not caring about the tone of what we write is almost as bad as saying something bad on purpose.
For example, at the receiving end the end result is objectively the same, making someone else feel like crap.
There absolutely is tone in writing. But people shouldn't be negating each other messages based on it, and drawing attention to the tone instead of the content is just a way to derail the conversation and not actually helpful.
