Please Please Be Good

Please please be good, you know that you should.  So many signs are implicitly negative rather than positive.  That’s often due to the desire to discourage specific activity.  It can be more positive and  engaging to instead encourage the desired activity.   So please be good rather than don’t be bad.

A lovely example here of a positive request basically “Please keep on the paths”,  rather than the so much more common negative request to “Please keep off the grass”.

That has a deeper impact than we might first think.  We have inbuilt trouble with thinking the reverse.   A good example is "do not think of a blue duck".  You can't help but envisage the duck.  By the same logic negative instructions start the thinking about the negative situation rather than the positive.