Grammarly and Google Docs define tone editing narrowly

The writer's problem

A writer revising a cover letter or a query email often wants a passage to sound more formal or more direct without changing what it says. Two mainstream tools document a feature built for exactly that narrower job, separate from generating new content. Grammarly's pricing page, retrieved 16 September 2026, and Google's help article on writing and editing with Gemini in Docs, retrieved the same day, both describe a tone or rewrite action distinct from open-ended drafting.

What the documents show

Grammarly's page states its Free plan lets a user see your writing tone, while Pro and Enterprise plans add the ability to rewrite full sentences with a click and adjust your writing tone with ease. The page frames tone detection as a baseline feature and full-sentence rewriting as a paid addition, a tiering choice specific to Grammarly's own plans rather than an industry standard. Google's help article describes a Refine menu in Docs with quick actions labeled Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate, Bulletize and Summarize, plus a toggle to make selected text more formal or more casual. Both documents describe the feature as acting on text the user has already written or selected, changing register and length rather than introducing new claims. Neither page states that tone adjustment carries less authorship risk than drafting; that is an inference from the scope each vendor documents, not a claim made by either company.

The editorial choice

An editor can treat a tone pass differently from a drafting pass because the documented scope is narrower: the tool is changing how existing sentences read, not deciding what the passage asserts. This is an editorial distinction worth making explicit in a style guide, since I used AI to rewrite this can describe either a register change or a full rewrite of substance, and the two vendor pages describe only the former as their tone feature.

What stays with the author

A tone change can still alter meaning, softening a claim or sharpening an assertion beyond what the writer intended, so a rewritten passage still needs a human read-through before it is treated as final. Neither Grammarly's nor Google's page addresses how a tone change should be disclosed in a manuscript; that remains an editorial decision outside either vendor's documentation.

• Did the tool change only register and length, or did it also change what the sentence claims?
• Does a style guide's disclosure rule distinguish a tone pass from a full rewrite?
• Is the tiering of a feature, such as Grammarly's split between detection and rewriting, relevant to which plan a newsroom or press should use?

Read side by side rather than as one shared standard, the two companies' documentation shows tone adjustment defined narrowly enough that treating it as equivalent to drafting would overstate what either tool does.