Using Acrolinx to Optimize Your Tone of Voicesupport.acrolinx.com /hc/en-us/articles/204501501-Using-Acrolinx-to-Optimize-Your-Tone-of-Voice

Applies To

Software Version

Acrolinx Server 5.0, 5.1

If you have an earlier server version, you can download an archived version of this article here .

OverviewYour company’s tone of voice — how the character of your business comes through in the words you write — canmake a lasting impression on anyone who reads your content. Here at Acrolinx, we can use our linguistic analyticsplatform to score the clarity, informality, and liveliness of your content. When it comes to clarity, we don't just providescores — we also give you specific guidance on how to change your content so that it has the level of clarity that'smost suitable for your target audience.

Scores and GuidanceWhen we talk about tone of voice, we'll discuss two different ways that Acrolinx can help: scores and guidance.

Scores

When you run a check and open the Acrolinx Scorecard, you'll see a section called Voice Characteristics .

This section shows you your tone of voice broken down into specific characteristics.

You get a score for each characteristic. These scores help you develop the right voice for your target audience. And,while there’s no one-size-fits-all approach — one company’s ideal voice may not be at all appropriate for another —it’s important to figure out what voice works for your audience, and then to ensure that you’re consistently writing inthat voice.

Guidance

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Sometimes scores aren't enough to help you adapt your tone of voice. Suppose thatyou're not happy with your scores. It can be hard to figure out which parts of yourcontent need improvement.

Acrolinx also gives you specific guidance on how to change your content so that it hasthe level of clarity that's most suitable for your target audience.

Here's how it works:

You open your editor, check your content, and in the Acrolinx sidebar you'll see specifichints on what sentences you should change to get the right level of clarity.

For now, the guidance is restricted to clarity, but we'll be covering more characteristicsin future releases.

Note that you won't get this kind of guidance in the classic-edition plug-ins. This feature only works with thesidebar-edition of our plug-ins.

How the Scoring Is Set UpWe set up the scoring for you and include it in your guidance package (formerly " linguistic resources " ). If you'd liketo check for another characteristic that isn't already in your guidance package, you can ask our professionalservices team to set it up for you.

When checking content with Acrolinx, you don’t need to do anything extra to get scores for your tone of voice. Afteryou install your guidance package, you'll see the scores for each voice characteristic on the Acrolinx Scorecard.

For some characteristics, there are special word lists that influence the score. For example, we have a list of wordsthat are overused in marketing copy. These words reduce the liveliness of a document. You can ask the professionalservices team to customize these lists for you when they set up your guidance package.

What You Can Configure YourselfThereare also some tone of voice settings that you can configure yourself:

If you want to turn off or rename some characteristics, you can update them in Dashboard.

If you have word lists, you can add more words or edit existing words.

You can also create audience types and assign them to your writers so that they know when to change thevoice of their content.

If you want to temporarily turn off voice scores, you can turn off voice scores in the core server properties.

Voice CharacteristicsYour tone of voice is made up of several characteristics. You receive scores based on how much your contentincludes each of these characteristics.

For example, your Acrolinx guidance package might be configured to check for clarity, liveliness, and informality. Youcan rename or turn off some of these characteristics in the Dashboard. You can also ask your Acrolinx professionalservices team to include more characteristics in your guidance package.

Renaming Voice Characteristics2/9

You can rename the voice characteristics if you have different terms for them in your organization. For example,your editors might use the term "energy" when they talk about the characteristic that we call "liveliness." You canchange the display name for the characteristic "liveliness" to "energy." This change helps your editors and writers tounderstand what the characteristic means.

To rename a voice characteristic, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Guidance Settings > Tone of Voice , select your language, and open the General Settings tab.

2. Review the table in the Voice Characteristics section and find the characteristic that you want to edit.

3. In the Display Name column, update the display name field.

Your changes take effect immediately.

Stop Acrolinx From Checking for Certain Characteristics

You can stop Acrolinx from checking for characteristics by turning them off. You might turn off some voicecharacteristics if you later decide that they aren’t relevant for your content. For example, you might decide that yourwriters should only focus on clarity for a specific project. You can turn off the other characteristics so that they don’tshow up in your Acrolinx Scorecard and distract your writers. You can always turn them on again later.

To turn off a voice characteristic, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Guidance Settings > Tone of Voice , select your language, and open the General Settings tab.

2. Review the table in the Voice Characteristics section and find the characteristic that you want to edit.

3. In the Enabled column, deselect the characteristic that you want to turn off.

Your changes take effect immediately.

Turning off Scores for All Characteristics

For some people, the scores for individual voice characteristics are more distracting than helpful. This might be thecase if tone of voice isn’t your primary focus and you just want to check for the basics such as style and terminology.

In this case, you can turn off the scores for the voice characteristics so that they don't show up in your scorecard.You turn of these scores by updating your core server properties.

To turn off scores for voice characteristics, follow these steps:

1. Open your overlay of the core server properties file.

Find the overlay for the core server properties file in the following location:

%ACROLINX_CONFIGURATION_ROOT%\server\bin\coreserver.properties

2. Add the following property:

voiceScoring.enabled=false

When this property isn’t present in the core server properties, the default value is true .

3. Save your changes and restart the core server.

Word Lists3/9

There are some kinds of words that can affect different voice characteristics. For example, the clarity of your contentcan suffer when you use complex words.

You can ask the Acrolinx professional services team to add a list of complex words to your guidance package.Content that contains words from your "complex words" list will get a lower clarity score.

The Acrolinx professional services team names each word list when they add them to your guidance package. Thisname tells you which characteristic the word list applies to. For example, a word list for clarity would be calledsomething like "Complex words for clarity."

Editing Word Lists

You can’t create new word lists yourself, but you can edit the word lists that Acrolinx has added for you. You mightupdate a word list when you discover more words that affect a certain characteristic. For example, you might findmore complex words that some writers tend to use instead of simpler words.

To edit a word list, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Guidance Settings > Tone of Voice , select your language, and open the General Settings tab.

2. In the Word Lists section, click the edit icon next to the list that you want to edit.

3. In the window that appears, add new words or update existing words.

Enter one word per line. To catch inflections of a word, enclose it in square brackets. For example, if youenter " [optimize], " Acrolinx also finds " optimized. "

4. Click OK .

Your changes take effect immediately.

Audience TypesYou can use audience types to give your writers an idea of what tone of voice they should aim for. Your Acrolinxguidance package comes installed with an audience type called "Standard." You can update this audience type ifisn't suitable for your content.

To set up a new audience type, first find some pieces of "benchmark content" that are written in the correcttone of voice for your target audience.

Check this content with Acrolinx. If you take the average of the scores that Acrolinx produces, you can usethese averages to set up your audience type.

Scores for your "benchmark content"

Settings for your Audience Type4/9

The previous illustration shows some tone of voice scores for some " benchmark " technical content.

In this case, the audience is server administrators who are trying to follow a complex technical procedure. Youmight call this audience type something like "Technical" or "Administrators." For this audience, clarity is moreimportant than liveliness or informality.

When you create this audience type in the Dashboard, you'll need to adjust the sliders in the tone of voice settings.You would update them so that they match the postions of the sliders in the Acrolinx Scorecard.

When writers check more content, they can open the scorecard and see if their content contains the right mixture ofvoice characteristics. The ideal range for a voice characteristic is indicated by the green area in the slider on thescorecard.

In the previous illustration, the checked content has a level of clarity that is right in the middle of the desired range— a perfect score.

If you use checking profiles, you can add several audience types for different writers .

Suppose that you want some writers to create content for marketing professionals. You might decide that thecontent needs to be more lively and informal than your technical content. In this case, you might do thefollowing:

1. Create a new audience type called " Marketing. "

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2. Increase the amount of liveliness required for that audience.

3. Assign the new audience type to your writers.

You do this by assigning a checking profile to your marketing writers . In the checking profile, set the "Target Audience type " to " Marketing. "

If you don’t use checking profiles, you can only edit the "Standard" audience type.

This basically means you can only target one type of audience at a time with the same tone of voice for allcontent.

Adding and Editing Audience Types

If you use checking profiles, you can add different audience types. If you don't use checking profiles, you can stilledit the "standard" audience type that comes with every guidance package.

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To add or edit an audience type, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Guidance Settings > Tone of Voice , select your language, and open the Audience Types tab.

2. To add more audience types, click Add .

You can only add extra audience types if you use checking profiles.

3. To edit an audience type, select the name of that audience type and update the tone of voice settings.

You do this by adjusting the sliders to mix and match the strength of each characteristic.

You'll notice that the "Clarity" slider is different from the sliders for the other characteristics. It has coloredsections to indicate the different ranges of clarity. The clarity slider is different because it also influences thetone of voice guidance that you get in the Acrolinx sidebar.

For example, if you say that your content can be more complex than average. Your writers will get fewerwarnings about complex sentences when they check their content.

Your changes take effect immediately.

Deleting Audience Types

If you use checking profiles, you can add multiple audience types. If you no longer require an audience type, youcan easily delete it in the Dashboard.

To delete an audience type, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Guidance Settings > Tone of Voice , select your language, and open the Audience Types tab.

2. Select a name from the list of Audience Types .

3. Click Delete .

Your changes take effect immediately.

Using Acrolinx to Edit for Tone of VoiceAs mentioned earlier — Acrolinx doesn't just give you tone of voice scores — you also get guidance on how tochange your content. For now, you get guidance on how to improve the clarity of your content, but we're working onincluding the other characteristics as well.

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You'll get the guidance in the Acrolinx sidebar whenever you check your contentwith Acrolinx.

You need to use a sidebar-edition of your preferred plug-in.

And, you need to make sure that the Tone of voice option is selected in yourchecking options.

Once you check your content, Acrolinx shows you potential tone of voice issues with special cards in the sidebar.

These cards are magenta colored and work a little differently to other cards.

For most issue types, each card corresponds to one individual issue in the content.

When you click the card, Acrolinx highlights the relevant text in your content.

For tone of voice, each card corresponds to an entire sentence that might contain several issues.

When you click the card, the card expands to show you hints about the clarity issues in your sentence.

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You can also click an individual hint to highlight the specific clarity issue. In the previous illustration, we'veselected the hint about the " chain of nouns " to see specifically where this issue occurs in our sentence.

Acrolinx doesn't provide suggestions for these issues because they usually don't have straightforwardsolutions. Acrolinx provides you with hints on how to improve the clarity, but we leave the editing to you.

4_7_Configuring_Tone_of_Voice.pdf (60 KB)

4_7_Konfigurieren der Prüfung von Tone of Voice.pdf (60 KB)

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