Tuesday, October 13

Ways of politeness

After reading the lecture notes on this topic, I realised people actually put in a lot of effort to be polite, that it makes me wonder if it is not part of human nature to be polite.

I think this topic of politeness can be linked to our previous topic of compliment response.

For example, when a classmate compliments me on doing well for an assignment, I could say, "I think you did a better job than I did." This is like a generosity maxim as I am minimising the expression of benefit to myself and maximising cost to self, because I am giving myself less credit for my work.

I think the topics we learn in this module are all kind of inter-linked in the sense that it is there to help us forge better relationships with each other, but at the right time. Here's a cartoon just for laughs.


Source: http://firstcertificate.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/howtobepolite.jpg

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