Linguistic Strategies for Balancing Clarity and Politeness JO MACKIEWICZ AND KATHRYN RILEY

INTRODUCTION An essential component of technical editors’ work is to convey to writers how their documents would benefit from revision. This task is potentially sensitive, given writers’ intellectual and emotional investment in the documents they have created. The sensitive nature of the editing process is clear in Rude’s (2001) advice to students of technical editing: “[A]void words that suggest inappropriate editorial intervention, especially change ” (p. 43). Rude’s advice suggests an awareness of the difficulty inherent in imposing oneself into the creative process of another person. Because of the defensiveness they might encounter in writers, editors must be cognizant of how they carry out their job—the language they use to convey necessary changes to writers’ documents. The language editors use can either facilitate good working relationships with writers or degrade those relationships. Editors, then, must carry out two tasks at once. They must be clear in conveying how a document should be changed, but they must also be polite to maintain good working relationships with writers. Managing these two needs—clarity and politeness—means managing the directness with which an editor states a writer’s obligation to change a document in some way. Linguists have for a long time noticed that, with a few exceptions, being less direct and more indirect in what one says generally makes one more polite (see, for example, Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983). For editors, this phenomenon leads to a “directness dilemma”—the need to be direct or clear in conveying a writer’s obligation to make a particular change, while at the same time using indirectness or politeness to maintain a good working relationship with that writer. This directness dilemma becomes even more complex when editors work with writers who are nonnative speakers, and these interactions are becoming more and more common. According to recent National Science Board statistics, for example, foreign citizens earned over 30% of master’s degrees awarded in the U.S. in engineering, computer science, and mathematics (National Science Board 2000). Thus, it is clear that editors will increasingly work with a nonnative speaker at some point during the document creation or review process. Interactions with nonnative speakers are even more complex than those with native speakers because, as Thonus (1999) writes, nonnative speakers “are more likely to misinterpret speech acts that do not map directly between linguistic form and function”—that is, indirect speech acts (p. 259). Thus, nonnative speakers may benefit from increased clarity in editorial interaction with them, but they of course respond positively to politeness as well. This article examines linguistic research to suggest how editors can best negotiate the directness dilemma by balancing clarity and politeness in their interactions with both native speakers and nonnative speakers.