I've sent more emails than I'd like to admit where the tone was just wrong. Too casual for a client. Too stiff for a teammate. Full disclosure: I built BeLikeNative, a free Chrome extension for real-time grammar and writing help. Take my perspective accordingly.
Tone is one of those things that's invisible when it's right and painfully obvious when it's off. A "hey can you check this out?" works fine in Slack. Drop that into a proposal and it reads like you don't take the work seriously. The words carry the same meaning, but the impression changes completely.
What informal-to-formal conversion actually looks like
The shift from informal to formal writing usually comes down to a few patterns. Contractions get expanded. Phrasal verbs get replaced with single-word equivalents. Personal pronouns get pulled back. And sentence structure gets tightened up.
Here are some real examples I run into constantly:
- "Thanks for getting back to me so quickly" becomes "I appreciate your prompt response."
- "The study checked out the health effects" becomes "The study examined the health effects."
- "The balloon was blown up for the experiment" becomes "The balloon was inflated for the experiment."
- "The patient got over his illness" becomes "The patient recovered from his illness."
These aren't dramatic changes. But they shift perception. The reader unconsciously registers the formality level and adjusts their expectations of you as a writer. I noticed this pattern repeatedly while working on BeLikeNative, and it's what pushed me to build the rephrasing feature around tone specifically.
How the extension handles it
The workflow is simple. You highlight text on any webpage or in any text field, hit a keyboard shortcut, and BeLikeNative suggests a more formal alternative. The rephrased version lands on your clipboard, ready to paste.
It works inside Google Docs, Notion, WhatsApp Web, and most browser-based text editors. I didn't want it to be something you had to context-switch into. The whole point was to keep you in whatever app you were already using.
One thing that surprised me during development: context matters more than vocabulary. Swapping "got" for "received" isn't always the right move. Legal writing demands different formality than academic writing, and both differ from a polished business email. So I added customization options that let you set the tone target based on what you're actually writing. A contract needs different language than a research abstract.
Setting it up
Installation takes about thirty seconds. Go to the Chrome Web Store, search for BeLikeNative, click "Add to Chrome." The icon shows up in your toolbar.
After that, you can adjust your tone and style preferences. I'd recommend spending a minute on this part. Setting the right defaults means fewer manual adjustments later. If most of your writing is business communication, set that as your default context. You can always override it for a one-off academic paper.
The extension also handles grammar, spelling, punctuation, and translation across 80+ languages. I originally built it for non-native English speakers (that's the "BeLikeNative" part), but it turns out tone adjustment is useful regardless of your first language.
Patterns worth knowing even without a tool
Tools help, but understanding the patterns makes you better at catching tone issues yourself. A few things I've learned from building this.
Active voice reads as more direct and confident. "The report was submitted by the team" sounds bureaucratic. "The team submitted the report" sounds like someone is in charge.
Sentence length matters too. Short sentences feel casual and punchy. Longer, more structured sentences with subordinate clauses signal formality. The trick is mixing them so your writing doesn't feel robotic.
Word choice is the most obvious lever. "Get" becomes "obtain." "Start" becomes "begin." "Find out" becomes "determine." These swaps feel small, but they accumulate. Three or four of them in a paragraph shift the entire register.
One thing I don't recommend: overcorrecting into stiff, impersonal prose. I've seen people turn perfectly clear writing into something that reads like a legal disclaimer. Formal doesn't mean unreadable. The goal is precision and professionalism, not density.
Where this fits into a real workflow
I use BeLikeNative most when I'm drafting client emails or writing documentation. The first draft comes out in whatever voice feels natural, usually pretty casual. Then I'll go through and adjust sections that need to sound more polished.
That two-pass approach works better for me than trying to write formally from the start. The ideas flow more freely when I'm not monitoring my tone in real time. The rephrasing step is fast enough that it doesn't slow me down.
For developers specifically, this comes up more than you'd think. Pull request descriptions, README files, technical proposals, messages to non-technical stakeholders. The code might be perfect, but if the surrounding communication reads like a text message, it undermines the work.
Pricing if you're curious
BeLikeNative has a free tier with 25 daily uses and a 1,000-character limit. That's enough for light use. Paid plans start at $4/month and go up to $14/month, scaling daily uses and character limits. The mid-tier plan at $6/month is where most regular users land, since it includes priority processing and 125 daily uses.
I tried to keep the free version genuinely useful rather than crippled. If all you need is a few tone adjustments per day, it'll cover you.
What's next
I'm working on better context detection so the extension can suggest the right formality level before you even set it manually. The gap between "good enough" and "reads like a native speaker" is shrinking, and I think tone-aware writing tools will be a normal part of everyone's browser within a couple of years.
I build BeLikeNative, a free Chrome extension that helps you write better English anywhere on the web. No signup, no data collection.
