Don’t say please
Good content design sometimes means acting against your most polite instincts.
By Anita McCullough
Anita is a Scroll content designer with years of experience in the private and public sectors. She’s also a professional artist, printmaker and an amateur fine art photographer.
When word count is tight, be ruthless
Time and time again, seeing short pieces of communication that retained ‘please’, I was being driven mad. Right there at the beginning, where the eye seeks what matters most, this superfluous word kept turning up. I began scoring out the word ‘please’, and found I was doing it a lot.
There is little doubt that ‘please’ is superfluous in 9 out of 10 pieces of public-facing content. Many content designers don’t quite know why they include it, except that it seems to flow better. Indeed, I know a content designer who admits that she finds it hard not to say ‘Please tell us...’ - or worse. I think, however, that ‘Please click on the link’ has been consigned to history. At least, I hope so.
But if you’d say it that way, why not write it that way?
It’s hard to escape the conditioning to be polite when entreating or wishing to draw particular attention. But this level of geniality should not transfer into content design. There’s certainly no need to include ‘please’ in a sentence that invites a person to: ‘Feel free to sit down and make yourself at home’, because you’re already making the command sufficiently polite. This may sound an unusual form of words, but even in these advanced times, you will find its like in instruction booklets and training manuals.
Let’s ditch the polite filler we don’t have room for
I’m making the argument for avoiding use of the word 'please', not just in transactional contexts, but also in announcements, such as this one, where the museum’s opening hours are all but obscured by the niceness surrounding it:
“P.S. Please note the Membership Office telephone line will be closed from 2 December and will reopen on 2 January. The Friends inbox will be monitored over the Christmas period, but you may experience a delay in response. The Membership Desk in the Great Court will remain open during opening hours for any onsite or urgent queries. Please be aware the Museum is closed from 24 - 26 December and we would advise checking the website before visiting for the latest information.”
But doesn’t saying ‘please’ add importance and a sense of urgency?
I can’t see that there’s any benefit in starting a sentence with ‘please’ when requiring specific attention and I’ve yet to see evidence that saying ‘please’ improves the likelihood of a desired action being taken. Use it too frequently, and it loses potency, that’s for sure. So, leave it out. Nothing bad will happen if you do.
If you wouldn’t mind…
‘Please’ has many uses, and one of them is the imperative. In this sign, the magic word all but obscures the point: if you park your car here, you’ll be blocking someone’s way. I’m itching to rewrite it as: “Don’t park here. We need to get out!”
And ‘please’ has a tendency to spawn the word ‘thank you’, as though we couldn’t possibly have one without the other. What about ‘Please remember to switch off all the lights when you leave’? Does it really make a difference? Why do we do this?
We’re at a linguistic disadvantage
If you say ‘merci’ in French, it is taken for ‘no’, short for ‘non, merci’. It does not mean: ‘Yes, thank you’ as some think.
Are we alone? How do non-English writers/speakers manage if they don’t use an equivalent of ‘please’? I put this question to David Adger, Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University, London.
Professor Adger says: “Generally, most languages have ways of expressing politeness. Many languages have a formal vs informal pronoun (tu/vous) or formal versus informal verb forms for imperatives (orders), and, when you use them, that means you don’t really need to say please.”
He gives the example of the French word, ‘écoutez!’, saying that because it’s already a polite form, there’s no need to add anything.
He reveals that: “Some languages, like Japanese, have very rich verb forms that mark how much respect you have towards the people you are talking about in the sentence. English lacks all that, so has to do the politeness work in other ways.”
So why, in English, are we hell-bent on compensating for our unintentional forthrightness? If we want to say ‘listen!’, because there’s no polite form, we feel we should add ‘please’. Or, as Professor Adger says, “we might make it a question (‘would you listen to this?’ ) or add in lots of extra modality such as ‘might you be able to perhaps listen to this?’”
What stands out for me now is that ‘please’ is “…[one of the] ways of making the thing you are saying indirect, and indirectness is the basic means English has to express politeness because it lacks special pronouns and verb forms that do that work.”
‘Please’ stops us getting to the point
I feel I’ve hit upon the crux of my problem, because as a content designer I am programmed to be as direct as possible: for me, blunt is indeed the sharpest of tools. So it isn’t merely the fact that the ‘P’ word takes up valuable space — it’s that I resent the way it prevents us getting straight to the business in hand.
Positioning definitely makes a difference to the meaning of the word. However, in its written form, it doesn’t really affect its value, whether it’s placed at the front, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence. I’d be interested to hear others’ views on this, but for the moment, I provide an example of where it’s used to no great purpose in the middle of a legal document:
What the colleague is told in the outcome letter
For cases where allegations are upheld, or partly upheld, please see QF2, QF3 and QF5 above. If allegations are not upheld, the reasons will be explained in the case summary and the outcome letter.
A genuine plea
I have to acknowledge that ‘please’, used sparingly, can add force, or express exasperation: “Oh please! Don’t tell that story again.” It can also indicate a certain independence of mind: “I’ll go whenever I please.” Which is, of course, a different usage again.
But I’d argue that in the context of content design, 99% of the time, ‘please’ does the user no favours, being merely the amble before the preamble before the important stuff. Edit it out of your communications, strike it out in ‘suggesting’ mode and take the consequences, if there are any. I make a genuine plea that you get straight to the point, and produce straightforward and unambiguous messaging, every time.