Polite doesn’t mean indirect
She spent years trying to make her English “polite”
by making it indirect.
She thought she was being respectful.
In reality, she was making things harder.
Here’s what that looked like.
This felt safe:
“I was wondering if it might be possible to perhaps schedule a call?”
It sounds polite.
But the listener now has to work.
They have to guess what she wants.
And decide how to respond.
That’s not polite.
It’s tiring.
Direct doesn’t mean rude.
“Could you schedule a call for Thursday?”
Clear. Simple. Respectful.
And here’s the part many German speakers don’t realise.
English speakers prefer this.
They hear clarity as professionalism.
Because clear requests are:
- easier to answer
- easier to act on
- easier to understand
Making things easier for others
is polite.
Thanks for clarifying that, Christine. What about the “please”: shouldn’t that be added? Otherwise, doesn’t the sentence sound too demanding, in the sense of being rude, at least to people in institutions that I don’t know very well yet?
Great question, Sigrid. Adding “please” is absolutely fine, especially in more formal contexts.
That said, the politeness is already built into “Could you…?”. In English, clarity is usually heard as professional, not demanding. Rude is abrupt. Clear is respectful.
And making it easy for someone to understand what you want is, in itself, polite.