Reading Tone: Part 3

Now to a 3rd🥉 consideration for helping interpret tone!

A good next step is to pause and explore the emotional undertones of the words themselves!

The words people use often have emotional undertones. Think about some common words, like love 💕 , hate 😡, wonderful, hard 🪨, work, explore, or kitten 🐈 .

If a text reads, “I love ❤️ this wonderful kitten 🐈‍⬛ ,” we can easily conclude that it is expressing positive emotions. If a text reads, “I hate this hard work 👷‍♀️,” that seems pretty negative. But, if a text reads, “This wonderful kitten is hard work,” what emotion do we think is being expressed?

One approach to detecting emotions when they appear to be mixed is to use the “bag-of-words” method. This means that we look at each word separately. How positive are the words “kitten” and “wonderful”? And how negative are the words “hard” and “work”?

By looking at how positive and negative each word is, we may be able to figure out the predominant emotion the texter is trying to express. Give this bag 💼 -of-words method a try when you are having a hard time figuring out the emotion in a text.

To flip this one in reverse ⏮️ before hitting send, use the same bag 💼 -of-words method to ensure you have a good balance of positive ➕words to prevent your message from being read the wrong way! And an exclamation point or two and a 😃🙂🥰 goes a long way to helping soften our words!