It’s amazing how many different ways a person can interpret a block of text. Without the benefit of inflection, it is possible for the recipient of an email to get an entirely different meaning than what you were hoping. If you’ve ever encountered a situation where this happened and someone took offense, then you might want to check out ToneCheck.
This piece of freeware (there are paid versions available with more features) analyzes your emails and lets you know when it detects a negative tone. What’s neat is that it will actually do this in real-time, so you can see exactly when your tone starts to take a sour turn, and thus re-think your wording. While it may not change your life, it will make you a little more aware of how your words might be taken by the recipient.
Damn I freaking needed to know about this piece of crap software to help with my tone. (do they have a version that checks blog comments?)