The phrase "awkward tone" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a manner of speaking or writing that feels uncomfortable or unnatural, often leading to misunderstandings or discomfort.
Example: "Her email had an awkward tone that made it difficult to understand her true feelings about the situation."
Alternatives: "uncomfortable tone" or "clumsy tone".
Even now, despite a new, rather awkward populist tone, serious relief for homeowners is lacking and financial regulatory reform is in danger of being hijacked by banking lobbyists and partisan politics.
Hardly scandalous, but slightly awkward as Tone, playing up his oh-so-proletarian past, had recalled standing on the terraces cheering a footballer who had actually retired before he was born.
His comment was awkward, politically tone deaf and worse, misleading.
The corpses' dialogue in "Graveyard Clay" is rendered in a sort of toned-down Hiberno-English, a defensible decision that nevertheless gives the text an occasionally awkward flavor.
Instead, strategists said, Trump's awkward and tone-deaf response to the Brexit vote left him more vulnerable to criticism from Clinton.
Paul's lack of pandering seems to stem, in part, from the fact that he is not a natural politician he comes across as shy, even standoffish, in social settings, and his speeches are often awkward or tone-deaf (his comparison between Guantanamo Bay and lynching, for example, tends to fall flat with black audiences).
Deborah Hedwall is delightful as the boundary-demolishing mom, but she is asked to paper over some increasingly awkward lurches in tone (1 25).
Yet at the same time it was hard to miss the awkward, almost apologetic tone of Time's coverage, as if the magazine's editors were conscious of the fact that they were doing something irregular in giving such prominence to an unashamedly highbrow writer, one who has, moreover, often been criticised in the past for being aloof, curmudgeonly and elitist.
The New Tenants has some well-known actors (always a good pull with voters), but has awkward shifts in tone and ends poorly.
Meredith Blake, writing for the Los Angeles Times, found that television Christmas episodes generally tended to bring "an awkward shift in tone: All of a sudden, everyone's being nice to each other".
