The comment letter policy represents a systematic innovation made by Chinese Securities Regulatory Agencies based on foreign experience. While recent literature has examined the impact of comment letters on standardized financial information disclosure, research on their impact on nonstandardized textual information disclosure is limited. This paper uses textual analysis of company annual reports to investigate the influence of comment letters on management tone. Our findings indicate that comment letters significantly reduce the tone of top management, particularly through increased use of negative words in the annual report text. This effect is more pronounced for firms with poorer performance, smaller scale, and lower analyst attention. Meanwhile, comment letters on financial issues have a greater impact than those on nonfinancial issues. Mediation effect model results show that comment letters can significantly reduce insider trading behavior by negatively influencing management tone, indicating a governance effect on nonstandard textual information tone. This paper expands research on comment letters’outcomes from quantitative financial information to qualitative text intonation and provides direct evidence of the impact of macro policies on management intonation.