Being more polite
(Part One)

Working in the hospitality industry, politeness is everything.

How can you be more polite in English?

As well as body language, facial expressions and a trusted smile, we add more words in English to be more polite.

Look at the following examples of a request:

Open!
Open it!
Open the window!
Can you open the window?
Could you open the window?
Would you mind opening the window?
Would you mind opening the window, please?
Would you be so kind as to open the window, please?
I would be extremely grateful if you wouldn’t mind opening the window, please?

Ok, so the last example is extremely polite!

The examples above are polite requests. Working in hospitality, you probably need to make polite offers every day.

Look at the following examples:

Help?
Can I help?
Could I help you?
Shall I help you, Madam?
Would you like me to help you, Madam?

We can be more polite and formal in English by using indirect questions. To make indirect questions, we can add a question to the front of our original question.

Could you tell me…?

But when we do this, the grammar in the original question changes.

What is your room number? – Could you tell me what your room number is?

If the auxiliary verb is the verb ‘BE’ (is/are/was/were) then we put it after the subject.

The subject of this question is room number.

How would you make this question more polite?

What time will you check out?

We will look at some answers and more examples with indirect questions in the next blog post…