If you, like me, find that email is almost that perfect tool for inadvertently offending people – all those rapid messages and bursting inboxes – then help is at hand, courtesy of FoxType.
The company has invented a tool to help you write in “a more polite, friendly tone”. Just visit the company’s website, enter your text in the box and the FoxType will check its tone, offering a breakdown of the negative and positive language used, as well as rewrite suggestions to make things a little friendlier.
“Your ideas are terrible and you are dull”, for example, gets an “impolite” tone, with the not entirely convincing rewrite suggestion of “It sounds like your ideas would be terrible and you are dull.”
Sounds great, right? The company is also working on a Gmail extension, to take politeness right into your inbox.