What are tone tags
in short, tone tags are used to help indicate tone of any given message. this is helpful for folks like me who struggle to interpret tone! here’s an example (pay attention to the bolded tags):
“[name] is a really cool person! like, just look at them, they’re glowing. /gen”
“[name] is a really cool person! like, just look at them, they’re glowing. /s”
the “/gen” tag clarifies that this is a genuine statement, versus the “/s” tag indicating the speaker is being sarcastic. this may seem obvious to you given the context of the conversation, but to someone who can’t judge tone well, you can see how much of a difference these statements are, despite the text being the same. one is positive and supportive, the other critical.
a good thing to do to determine how often you should use tone tags is ask the person you’re talking with, especially if they’re open about being neurodivergent. different people will have different preferences! using tags like these can save you (and the person who needs them) a lot of miscommunication errors, leading to smoother conversations.
if you want more information about tone tags and how to use them, consult this website! thanks for asking :]
Tone tags are not your punchline.
Tone tags like “/j” “/srs” etc are accessibility tools. They help neurodivergent people understand the explicit tone of written text that would otherwise be only implicit and therefore difficult for us to understand. If you use tone tags in a joking or disingenuous manner, you’re not only going to end up confusing a lot of people, but it’s also just plain ableist to make a joke out of an accessibility tool, something that a lot of us rely on to understand and communicate with people online.
Especially considering the whole point of tone tags is for them to be used in the most genuine, accurate manner possible, someone knowingly misusing them just means they’re doubling down on their ableist disregard for neurodivergent people who might read it.
If you post something somewhere as a joke but end it with a “/srs,” fix it. Delete it. Don’t do it again. Tone tags are not your punchline.
This disability pride month message brought to you by an autistic ADHDer
A problem with tone tags that I don’t think anyone realized we’d have is that, because the people who use/need tone tags most are neurodivergent, we tend to interpret them differently.
I have friends who have expressed they don’t like /gen because it feels insincere. I have other friends who love /gen (myself included) because they have anxiety and it reassures them that I mean what I say. I can’t use /nm around a couple people because it reads to them like I am indeed mad. Sometimes /nav reads as intended, and sometimes it doesn’t. At some point I started using /silly instead of /j because it made more sense to me, but then I have to explain it because that’s just a whole extra word attached to the end. Don’t even get me started on what /hj means to everyone