August 6, 2026

Choosing a tone, and a strength

Two controls, and most people move only one. The tone is the obvious choice. The strength is where the result is actually decided.

What the strength does

Low strength keeps your structure and your sentences and changes the phrasings that give the text away. High strength rebuilds the paragraph: sentences merge, split, change order, disappear.

So the question is not "how human do I want this". It is "how much of the original do I need back". Something you wrote yourself and want cleaned up wants 30 to 50. Something a chatbot produced from a two-line prompt, where nothing in the wording is yours, takes 80 without any loss, because there was nothing to lose.

The mistake we see most: high strength on a text the person is attached to, then disappointment that a favourite sentence is gone. It is gone because you asked for it to be gone.

Natural

The default, and the right answer more often than the other three. It removes the machine rhythm without pushing the register in any direction. Blog posts, documentation, newsletters, anything where the voice should be yours and not a costume.

Try 60 first. If it still reads a bit even, go up ten.

Professional

Tightens the register. Contractions go, the vocabulary firms up, the sentences carry themselves more formally. Useful for client-facing documents, proposals, anything a legal or finance team will read.

One warning: professional plus high strength drifts toward corporate, and corporate has its own tells. If the output starts sounding like a press release, drop to 50.

Casual

The opposite move. Contractions come back, sentences get shorter and less careful, the text sounds like someone talking. This is the one for support replies, community posts, product emails to people who already like you.

It is also the tone where high strength does the least damage, because informal writing tolerates being rebuilt. 80 is comfortable here.

Concise

The only tone with a hard constraint attached: the output has to be shorter than the input. No new asides, no added hedging, no flourishes. It cuts.

That constraint was not there at first, and the tone quietly produced text six percent longer than what went in, because the general rewriting rules kept adding rhythm and variation. Now the tone wins over those rules and a typical result comes back about ten percent shorter.

Use it on anything a chatbot padded: meeting notes, a summary that grew three paragraphs of throat-clearing, a support reply that explains the same thing twice.

A few combinations that work

• Support reply drafted with AI: Casual, 80. Then read it once, because a fact you have to be right about is worth eight seconds.
• Landing page copy: Natural, 70. Marketing writing has its own machine tells, and they are loud.
• Cold email: Concise, 70. Almost every AI-written cold email is twice as long as it should be.
• Technical documentation: Natural, 40. Low, because code, commands and exact terms matter more than rhythm. They are preserved either way, but at 40 the surrounding explanation stays close to what you meant.
• Something a client will sign: Professional, 50, then a human read. Or a human reviewer, if it has to be genuinely human.

What never changes

Whatever tone and strength you pick, facts, numbers, dates, names, prices, links, code and formatting come through untouched, and the output stays in the language of the input.

Your last choice is remembered, so once you find the pair that suits what you write, you stop thinking about it.

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