Tone indicator

Because written communication lacks the nonverbal cues of face‑to‑face interaction – such as vocal inflection, facial expressions, and body language – tone indicators serve as their textual substitutes to reduce misinterpretation. They are particularly common among the neurodivergent community, who often struggle to understand tone.

In casual online communication over the Internet, tone indicators are sometimes represented by a forward slash (/) followed by a few letters, such as /j for "joking" or /gen for "genuine", placed at the end of a sentence.

History

Early attempts to create tone indicators stemmed from the difficulty of denoting irony in print media, and so several irony punctuation marks were proposed. The percontation point (⸮; a reversed question mark) was proposed by Henry Denham in the 1580s to denote a rhetorical question, but usage died out by the 1700s.

In 1668, John Wilkins proposed the irony mark, using an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to denote an ironic statement. Various other punctuation marks were proposed over the following centuries to denote irony, but none gained popular usage. In 1982, the emoticon was created to be used to denote jokes (with :-)) or things that are not jokes (with :-().

The syntax of modern tone indicators stems from /s, which has long been used on the Internet to denote sarcasm. This symbol is an abbreviated version of the earlier /sarcasm, itself a simplification of </sarcasm>, the form of a humorous HTML closing tag marking the end of a "sarcasm" block, and therefore placed at the end of a sarcastic passage.