Offering your seat to an elderly person or holding the door for just about anyone walking close-behind you are good manners and must be done; something most of us have been programmed to do since our childhood. But there are other things that are a little bit trickier to categorise as polite or rude; a fine line most of us mostly miss especially, when indulging in written communication.
If you have often found yourself re-reading your mails a million times before hitting the send button because of a constant fear of sounding rude, Fox Type politeness web app could help ease your nerves.
Within a single page layout, Fox Type has a dialogue box where you can key in your content and hit the “check tone” button. Based on your choice of words, it will check the tone on a scale of 100 and tell you if you sound impolite (in red), neutral (in orange) or polite (you guessed it; green). There is also another category — contentious — if you end up using cuss words, in which case there should not be a need to check for politeness at all, but if you must, it’s a grey area (shown in grey too).
The website also gives re-writing suggestions which are not of much use but could offer a cue to sound a little more polite and reframe your sentences to suit
the communication.
For easier access, you can go ahead and download a Gmail plug-in and monitor every mail that leaves your mail box.