Tone
Tone is the emotional or attitudinal quality conveyed by communication, including the interpersonal manner in which it addresses its audience or subject.
Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read
A conversational tone is an informal, direct manner of communication that resembles peer-to-peer dialogue.
- How it is used
- Uses conversational tone to keep engineering writing engaging, trustworthy, personable, and connected to the target reader.
- How deep it goes
- Explains voice, word choice, sentence complexity, formality, and personal disclosure, but rejects one universal level of informality.
- Examples
- Uses colleague conversations, text-chat personas, personal mistakes, faux dialogue, rants, and bug-hunt turning points as models.
- What you can do after
- Apply conversational tone by revising stiff prose into clear, concise, authentic writing that sounds recognizable to familiar colleagues.
Read how Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read explains tone →
WordPress Power Toolkit: Harness AI to build next-level websites
Tone is the emotional or attitudinal quality conveyed by written language toward its subject or audience.
- How it is used
- Shapes website writing so visitors find it welcoming, approachable, and appropriate to the site’s purpose.
- How deep it goes
- Defines conversational tone, contrasts formal exceptions, demonstrates a rewrite, and outlines AI-assisted refinement.
- Examples
- Uses a recipe-site introduction, a formal-to-colloquial rewrite, GPT-4o prompts, and Copilot’s Revise workflow.
- What you can do after
- Apply conversational tone by rewriting stiff website prose and using AI to check clarity, formality, and approachability.
Read how WordPress Power Toolkit: Harness AI to build next-level websites explains tone →
Everyday Data Visualization
Tone is the emotional or stylistic character conveyed by a visual design or written communication.
- How it is used
- Uses typography to communicate feeling and personality alongside the literal meaning of written words.
- How deep it goes
- Explains tone through letterform departures, spatial behavior, and comparative examples, without detailing font-production methods.
- Examples
- Compares rounded and crisp sans serif forms, handwritten-like scripts, minimalist spaces, and six named fonts across enlarged samples and paragraphs.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate typefaces by the feelings, impressions, and spatial character their letterforms evoke.
Learn Haskell by Example
A tone is a sustained musical sound characterized by a particular frequency and waveform.
- How it is used
- Generates audio signals for a digital music box and combines them into controllable musical events.
- How deep it goes
- Explains waveform functions, period sampling, WAV conversion, clipping, and abrupt-stop artifacts, while deferring deeper timbre modulation.
- Examples
- Uses sine, square, sawtooth, and triangle waves, then exports four concatenated 220 Hz WAV segments.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch in Haskell by defining waveforms, generating sampled tones, limiting signals, and exporting WAV files.
Related concepts
- sentiment analysismeasured by · Sentiment analysis is the computational identification, classification, or measurement of opinions, attitudes, emotions, or evaluative polarity expressed in text or other data.
- writingconfigured by · Writing is the activity of composing text to communicate ideas, information, experiences, or arguments.
- styleused by · A style is a characteristic set of choices or properties governing the form, appearance, or manner of expression of an artifact or output.
- natural languageuses · Natural language is a human language that develops through social use and is used for communication, in spoken or written form.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.