It is also important to understand people have to change their level of politeness in certain relationships when there are low levels of closeness, knowledge of cultural importance, or large power gaps. Politeness theory also does an adequate job of taking context into consideration when helping people decide how to commit face threatening acts, if they chose to.
Politeness theory falls short because it is impersonal. It tells people how to act when conditions are a certain way, but each unique person should require unique communication strategies. Brown and Levinson’s theory break politeness levels down into a spectrum of five actions, but by limiting the number of strategies, each person’s communication would not be considered