In a tense time when a pandemic rages, politicians wrangle for votes and protesters demand racial justice, a little politeness and courtesy go a long way. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an automated method for making communications more polite. Specifically, the method takes nonpolite directives or requests--those that use either impolite or neutral language--and restructures them or adds words to make them more well-mannered. "Send me the data," for instance, might become "Could you please send me the data?" The researchers will present their study on politeness transfer at the Association for Computational Linguistics annual meeting, which will be held virtually beginning July 5.