Welcome to this video on an Introduction to Tone and Style. Imagine the following situation. You're a manager. You've sat down with a colleague, who's just graduated from university and you're in a performance appraisal where you want to give some encouraging feedback and you say the following. I think it was bad that you were not able to call the client when there was a problem. This is not acceptable. How do you think your colleague's feeling at the moment? Not particularly good, right? So remember with all communication there is always a sender and a receiver. So whatever you say, whatever you write, is all received by the audience and interpreted or they react in a good or a bad way. This all comes down to tone and style, which is what we're gonna be covering in this video today. So by the end of this video we want you to have a basic understanding of tone and style. Why it's important and how it can be used. So let's get started. What is tone? Put very simply, it's how you sound when you speak or write to the listener or to the reader. What about style? Again, put very simply, it's how you deliver your message. So for example in a face to face situation, it might be how you use your body language or your facial expressions, okay. So that determines style. So why is tone and style so important in communication? As I mentioned before, with all communication there's a sender and receiver, so whatever we, as a communicate sends, the receiver reacts in a positive, negative, or neutral way. Why? Well, ultimately, we're all humans. We have feelings, we have emotions. We could feel happy, or sad, or confused when somebody says something to us. Also we also as communicators have objectives, so we might want our audience to feel a certain way. It's our intention, okay? So in the table you'll see some examples of positive, neutral, or negative tone. Let's start off with positive tone. You might wanna sound confident in a job interview situation, or you might wanna sound motivating to your team, who's just about to work 24 hour shift to meet a deadline. What about neutral tone? Well, here, you don't wanna sound overly positive or you don't wanna sound overly negative, so you might wanna keep your information factual. You might want to be as polite as possible. Set some distance between you and the audience and be as diplomatic as possible to avoid any potential negative reaction, perhaps. What about negative tone? Well, what we said previously about wanting to sound motivating could actually sound arrogant to the audience. Or you might want to use a warning tone with your colleague or your subordinate if they've been underperforming and you wanna express the seriousness of the situation. So what determines tone? It can be your choice of language, your words or your phrases. For example, the following four phrases all express a request. The first one, I would like you to, I encourage you to, could sound neutral, could sound positive. What about, I urge you to? And this could be neutral. It could also be negative cuz you're trying to urge someone to do something. And it could sound a bit pushy to whoever you're saying it to. What about I strongly or I seriously advise you to? This also could be neutral but also you're trying to express the seriousness of a situation. So the audience could feel negative about that. So how do you determine style? Well, it can be anything from your use of body language, your facial expressions, how you use your voice, the pitch, the tone. In writing situations it could be the formality of your language, so the first sentence is more informal or personal. The second sentence here uses more formal language, so it could be part of an official company document such as a company report or proposal. So how can you use tone and style? Well, it starts off with the first step, purpose. What exactly do you want to achieve with your communication? For example, you might want to motivate your team as you're about to introduce a new sales initiative which requires quite a lot of work. So you gotta think about how you wanna sound. So in this situation, you wanna sound as positive as possible because you have to try and encourage them and get them on board. Then you move on to choosing the appropriate tone and style to match the purpose in how you wanna sound. For example, in this situation that I've used you wanna use as positive words, language, or phrases. In terms of the style, you might wanna choose animated body gestures, or enthusiastic facial expressions, if that's how your audience is motivated and then you choose the appropriate style. So let's do a quick recap. In this video we've covered the basics of tone and style. It's how you sound and how you deliver your message. And also why is it important? Because the receiver or the audience can always react a certain way. Also, we want the audience, in terms of our objectives, our communication objectives, to feel or react a certain way too. So we choose the appropriate tone and style, okay. So it comes down to the three step method about how it can be used, your purpose, whether you want to sound positive or negative or neutral and you choose the appropriate tone and style to match these accordingly. So one last thing. Tone and style is also determined by the relationship between you and the audience. It could be a personal relationship so you choose maybe an informal tone or style. It can be hierarchical, you're trying to your communicate to your boss or the senior management and then you'd probably choose a bit more of a formal tone or style. And it could also be cultural differences that determine these, so I will cover these more throughout the course. So thanks for watching.
