Set brand tones

Who has access:
Grammarly Business and Grammarly Pro admins, account managers, group managers, and members with designated custom roles

The brand tones feature allows you to set a tone profile that customizes Grammarly’s feedback to your organization’s unique brand voice.

Topics covered in this article:

• What is a tone?
• How can Grammarly help my team with brand tones?
• Getting started
• How do I add a tone to my tone profile?
• Can I change the explanation for a tone in my tone profile?
• Can I limit brand tone feedback to certain websites?
• How do I create additional tone profiles?
• What access do team members with different roles have?

What is a tone?

While the grammar, spelling, clarity, and conciseness of your writing are important factors to ensure better writing, the tone of your writing can also change how people understand it. For example, if someone wanted to apologize, they could say “I’m terribly sorry about that.” Or they could say “Oops. I’m sorry!” Both sentences convey the same message but with different tones.

Said differently, you can think of a tone as the mood or emotion a piece of writing conveys. To learn more about what tone is in writing, check out this blog post.

How can Grammarly help my team with brand tones?

Grammarly analyzes the tone of your writing using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI). You can set up a brand tone profile for your teams or organization. You can assign different tones as on-brand or off-brand. Your team will then see real-time feedback about their tone as they write to help them stay on-brand.

Getting started

1. Go to your Home page.
2. Click on the Writing tab and choose Brand tones.
3. On the next page, click Set up tone profile.
4. In the window that appears next, select the sentences that best reflect how you would want your team to sound in each scenario:
   
5. After responding to several prompts, you’ll be able to review your answers. If you’re satisfied, proceed to the next step by clicking Analyze Answers.
6. We’ll generate a recommended tone profile for you. Click View tone profile to finish the process.
7. You’ll then see the recommended tones added to your tone profile. From here, you can edit the descriptions for tones, delete them entirely, or add more tones to your tone profile by clicking Add Tones in the upper-right corner.
8. That’s it! Your team members will now see tone recommendations as they write.

How do I add a tone to my tone profile?

To add tones to your tone profile, follow these steps:

1. Click Add tones in the upper-right corner.
2. In the window that appears next, choose whether the tones you’d like to add should be on-brand or off-brand. Tones labeled as on-brand will be encouraged for your team, while tones labeled off-brand will be discouraged.
3. Select a tone group from the dropdown list.
4. If you’d like to exclude a specific tone from the tone group, you can uncheck the box next to it.
5. Add an explanation or use the description generated by Grammarly and click Save.
   

Can I change the explanation for a tone in my tone profile?

To change an explanation, click the pencil icon under a group of tones:

In the window that appears next, you can edit the text under Explanation for tones. Sometimes, Grammarly may be able to autogenerate a description that you can then modify. If an autogenerated description is available, you can click on Custom description generated by Grammarly at the bottom of the window to insert it.

Can I limit the brand tones feedback to certain websites?

Yes, you can specify a list of URLs where you’d like the tone profile feedback to appear. You may find this useful if your tone profile is geared toward external communication (for example, writing publicly on Twitter) but less important for internal communication (for example, Slack messages).

To create an allowed list of websites, go to the Brand Tones page, click on the three dots in the upper-right corner, and choose Settings:

In the window that appears next, choose Specific websites, add the URLs of the websites where you would like your tone profile feedback to appear, and confirm the changes by clicking Save. On all other websites, your team members will see detected tones without on-brand or off-brand labels.

Formatting tips:

• google.com (without “www”): Use this format to include all associated URLs, including www.google.com, mail.google.com, docs.google.com, etc.
• docs.google.com: Use this format to include only the page found at a specific URL.

How do I create additional tone profiles?

Note: This option is not included in Grammarly Pro plans. Members of Grammarly Pro plans can create one brand tone profile.

To create an additional tone profile, follow these steps:

1. Go to your Home page.
2. Click on the Writing tab and choose Brand tones.
3. On the next page, click on the three dots in the upper-right corner and choose Create tone profile:
   
4. In the new window that appears, click Create tone profile.
5. Enter the tone profile name and select the groups of users it should be assigned to.
6. If you want the tone profile to work on certain websites, choose Specific websites, add the website URLs, and click Save.

Note: If you haven’t created any groups yet, you can refer to this article to do so: Organize team members into groups

To create more tone profiles, go to the Brand Tones page and click Create tone profile in the upper-right corner.

Note: A single user group can have only one brand tone profile assigned to it. If you assign a different brand tone profile to a group that already has one assigned to it, that group will no longer see recommendations from the original brand tone profile. A single brand tone profile, on the other hand, can be assigned to multiple user groups.

What access do team members with different roles have?

Team members with the admin and account manager roles have editing permissions for all brand tones functionality: they can create, edit, or delete brand tone profiles assigned to all user groups.

Team members with group manager permissions can create and edit brand tone profiles only for the user groups they are assigned to manage. Group managers can view the brand tone profiles assigned to other groups but can’t make any changes to them.

If you’re a Grammarly Enterprise admin, you can also create a custom role that grants permissions to manage brand tones for your organization, but without full admin privileges. You can learn more in this article: About custom roles

Note: The group manager permissions and custom toles are available only to Grammarly Enterprise customers.

Team members with the user role can view the brand tone profile assigned to them but can’t make any changes.