Qualifiers: how to sound more polite in a business meeting

If you often attend meetings and negotiations as part of your job, you will know how important it is to avoid direct disagreement.

A disagreement can occur if we make a very direct and simple statement to express what we’re thinking. Statements which are too direct can sound confrontational and as a result the person you’re negotiating with may be offended or get upset.

Look at these very direct statements:

• The price is high.
• It’s a problem.
• I’ll be late.
• There might be delays with the delivery.
• We have to make changes.
• It’s difficult to do.

All of the above statements are too direct for a polite negotiation. They may say what you are thinking, but they can sound impolite or aggressive and may lead to a direct disagreement.

Qualifiers will ‘soften’ a direct statement

In order to sound more diplomatic we should soften our direct statements. One way of doing this is by using qualifiers – words which we put before another word to make it sound less direct.

Here are some common ‘softening’ qualifiers in English:

• a little
• a bit
  
• a little bit
  
• slight
• slightly
  
• short
• small
• one or two.

Now let’s use these qualifiers in sentences:

• The price is a little high.
• It’s a slight problem.
• I’ll be a little bit late.
• There might be one or two short delays with the delivery.
• We have to make one or two small changes.
• It’s a bit difficult to do.

See how the direct statements are now softer and less direct. We now sound more diplomatic and a direct disagreement is less likely.

This is how qualifiers work. There are, of course, other ways of sounding polite and less direct during a negotiation. I’ll look at these in a future post.

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