I tried a controversial Chrome email extension that warns you when your language undermines your message. It made me pay more attention to the words I use.

• Just Not Sorry is an email extension for helping you sound more confident by cutting out words that undermine your message.
• It has stoked some controversy, but I tried it out regardless to see if it could help me identify trouble spots in my emails.

There's no shortage of Chrome email plug-ins out there, helping with everything from managing inbox clutter to writing punchier messages.

I recently tried out an email extension that helps people nix language that it says softens or weakens their speech. It's called Just Not Sorry and, though it's been around for a few years, I'd never tried it before, so I decided to give it a shot.

It's designed to help users, particularly women, "build awareness of how we qualify our message and diminish our voice" and "send more confident emails by warning you when you use words which undermine your message," according to its Chrome Web Store listing.

Although Just Not Sorry was widely praised when it first came out, it has also stoked some controversy.

There's the argument that it suggests women can't succeed in the workplace as themselves; they need to speak, and more broadly, act like men. Others ask if we really need something that can make women even more self-conscious of their language in a world that already heavily polices how women should speak and sound.

I believe there's some truth to these criticisms, so I was a bit skeptical. But I went for it anyway to see if it could prove me wrong and still be beneficial. I kept these criticisms in mind when using it, and this helped me better evaluate if I was changing my language to meet expectations of women's communication or if I believed the word choice was genuinely weighing me down.

Just Not Sorry works by warning users about roughly two dozen words and phrases that can undermine what they're trying to say. The extension underlines these in red as you write an email and explains how they can hurt your message.

The warning list includes words like "just," "maybe," "sorry," "literally," and "actually," as well as phrases like "I think," "in my opinion," and "does that make sense."

Just Not Sorry provides the warnings, but it's ultimately up to you whether to leave something in your email or remove it. It doesn't pick up on context, so it alerts you to every mention of these words and phrases, even in cases where some would be appropriate. In some instances, of course, you'll need to use some of these words and phrases; forgoing an apology where one is warranted isn't confident, it's rude.

From the list of undermining words and phrases, there are a few I often use, but I never say about half of the things on the list, so the extension's utility for me was somewhat limited from the start. Even among the ones I commonly use, they mostly don't pop up in my emails but rather in places like Slack or in verbal speech. For these two reasons, Just Not Sorry wasn't very helpful for me in the way it was designed: for email.

However, testing the extension made me pay more attention to the language I use elsewhere, outside of email. I also became more aware of when I was exhibiting certain speech patterns that may undermine a message but can't be boiled down to a word or phrase.

Having tested it out, I won't keep using Just Not Sorry. It didn't do much for me in the medium where it's designed to help, but it made me more cognizant of cases where I may be using undermining language. Whether that's a boon or a problem, as criticism of the extension suggests, is debatable.

One thing that is sure: I certainly don't expect to cut the words and phrases from the list out of my vocabulary forever (see: the uses of "I believe" and "very" above.)