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Ask nicely: Difference between revisions
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If no-one comes in your shop there is no point having a door, or for that matter a shop, at all. | If no-one comes in your shop there is no point having a door, or for that matter a shop, at all. | ||
“you may not enter without a face mask”. | |||
This sets up the worst possible outcome: that a customer is is outright barred from entering the shop, as its default option, which the customer must overcome by meeting certain conditions. A customer will feel proactively unwelcome - even if it can meet those conditions -and many will accept the invitation to continue walking. even those who enter will have felt tidied and commanded to behave in a certain way and will be less favorably disposed as a result. | |||
“you must wear a face mask before entering this store.” | |||
This is bossy, and it assumes the reader is in non compliance with the instructions. It sets up a tone if shpokeeperism and, in chiding, resentment, as if the customers arrival is some kind of necessary evil and will only be reluctantly tolerated under certain circumstances. | |||
“please keep your mask on when in the store.” | |||
This is better, as firstly it makes the assumption that the user is in compliance and is not therefore chiding in nature semicolon secondly it imposes no condition on entry, but rather assumes that the customer will enter; thirdly in assuming that the customer is already wearing a mask it prompts the customer who might not be to put on a mask without directly instructing this behaviour so, there is no direct command for those customers who are not wearing a mask. Their decision to to do so is there for their own voluntary initiative and not a response to a direction. However, there is a specific instruction to take a certain course of action at the exclusion of all others, so so again the customer is being commanded to take a single action in a certain sense. | |||
“please do not remove your mask when in the store”. | |||
This has all the advantages of of the the example above: it assumes compliance, imposes no condition on entry, and and allows the customer to make its own decision to put on a mask if it is not wearing one. Additionally, it phrases the requirement to keep the mask as a negative, there by not compelling a single course of action, | |||