Tone

What is tone?

Tone refers to the attitude, mood, and emotional quality conveyed through the language of learning materials. Tone is communicated through word choice, level of formality, and sentence structure. Common writing tones include informal tone, conversational tone, encouraging tone, professional tone, and objective tone. Instructional designers typically match tone to their audience, content, learning goals, and brand.  

Example: To engage and motivate our learners, we decided to use an encouraging writing tone in the growth mindset training module. 

A consistent writing tone—or using the same language level throughout an elearning module—helps learners stay engaged and promotes clarity and readability for your audience.

Why is tone important in training content?

Different tones create different learning atmospheres. Instructional designers often use a conversational or friendly tone to engage the learner, an encouraging tone to motivate the learner, or a professional tone to build topic authority. 

Using the right tone in learning content makes it easier to understand. For example, a course on compliance is best conveyed through a professional tone to communicate to the learner how serious the topic is. A course on soft skills like adaptability, on the other hand, benefits from an encouraging and friendly tone to engage and motivate the learner. 

How to adjust writing tone with AI

Writing tone can be adjusted through different word choice, phrases, sentence structure, and by using pronouns such as you, we, or us for a more personal approach. Articulate’s AI Assistant allows instructional designers to improve, edit, or refine tone and writing quality to be more professional, casual, straightforward, confident, or friendly. Users can even customize tone using an open prompt to perfectly match text to their audience.