"You will want to __"
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Email from a reader:
In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business, I have noticed a regular use of the FUTURE tense, when the present would perfectly suffice. Sometimes, but not always, this is combined with telling me what I WILL WANT to do. To wit,
– "you WILL WANT TO ____"
– "the beverages WILL BE on the back of the menu"
There is nothing "wrong" grammatically or logically with any of this (as if there could be). It is perfectly accurate and cromulent. But these forms are relatively new, I conjecture. Even a little jarring.
I can posit my own hypotheses regarding how and why these usages increased in prevalence in recent tears. Is there a literature on it, perhaps already covered by Language Log?
I should start by noting that some people object to calling the English word will a marker of "future tense" — see e.g. Rodney Huddleston's (I think convincing) article "The case against a future tense in English", Studies in Language 1995. Use of will often involves a hypothetical future time reference, as I think it does in examples like those in the email, but the asserted proposition is (often) also true at the time of speaking or reading, wherefore the will is (often) optional.
However, I'm skeptical of the idea that such usage is a Gen Z innovation, since similar things have been around for centuries.
For example, an article published in the NYT on 5/28/1894, under the headline "Buffalo Politicians Surprised", starts this way:
…and ends like this, informing readers that the relevant background "will be found on page 9":
That story was in fact found on page 9 of that edition, so it would also have been appropriate to write that "The story of Sheriff Beck's removal is found on Page 9". The force of the modal "will" is to imply something like "If you care to look…" — it's not a prediction about the future as of May 1894.
And an 1846 Report on the Present State of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal tells us that the "The Baltimore and Ohio Rail-road Company, in the page of their report referred to, represent that actual cost of carrying coal on their road from the mines to Baltimore, will be, to them, per ton, per mile, 1 046/1000 cents", so that "This, for the distance of 188 miles, will be $1 966/1000":
These hypothetical costs are presented as an estimate of the actual costs as of 1846, if anyone cared to arrange such a shipment, so that "will be" could logically have been replaced by "is".
I don't know of any discussion of this particular question in the scholarly literature, beyond what's implied in papers like Huddleston's.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Usage has nothing but a few pages on shall vs. will. But there's quite a bit of relevant stuff in the English usage internet, e.g. "What does 'you will want to' mean?", or "You will want vs. you want", or "'You'll find that…'".
Even though things like this have been around in English for a long time, it still could be true that Gen Z people (those born between 1997 and 2012) use them more frequently, in general or in certain contexts. But this isn't something that I've noticed, and I'm not sure how to check it.
jin defang said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:33 pm
much this is just what I can "word-stretching"—why not just said "the story continues of p. whatever rather than "will be found on"?
sometimes, however, the "will" is a not-too-subtle order to do something. "Students will want to make sure that all their data are backed up. The university is not responsible for…" kind of thing.
VVOV said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:46 pm
In "the beverages will be on the back of the menu", my intuition is that "will" functionally serves as a politeness marker, casting the sentence into a restaurant service-y register that is slightly fancier than "the beverages are on the back of the menu".
In "you will want to [verb]", the more salient thing to me is the use of "want" to mean "ought/should", which is somewhat uncommon but is certainly not new or due to Gen Z. For example, it's in Merriam Webster's entry on "want", with the the example "You want to be very careful what you say." Perhaps the innovation being highlighted by the OP is the use of this "want" in a positive/helpful/polite context, when it's more traditionally used in an admonition like the M-W example sentence.
Terry K. said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:46 pm
Two thoughts.
It occurs to me that there doesn't necessarily have to be one single answer as to whether or not "will" should be considered as a future tense auxiliary. We've different dialects and registers in the language, after all.
Also, Google Books Ngram Viewer shows generally increasing instances of "will want to" over time, but not with a pattern suggesting it's something new with Gen Z.
Gregory Kusnick said,
June 9, 2025 @ 1:03 pm
One might quibble and say that the story was in fact printed on page 9, where it would be found by any reader who looked. But at the time of publication, no reader had looked yet; hence "will be found".
Mai Kuha said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:04 pm
I'm aligned with VVOV's intuition of "will" as a politeness marker. Don't longer utterances tend to be more polite than shorter ones? The motivation could be that a longer utterance is evidence of going to more effort, ostensibly to the addressee's benefit.
I still remember a day in 1999 when a university administrator called my office asking for my predecessor. When I identified myself as a new hire, she said "You want to change your outgoing voice mail message". That seemed rude to me, and "will want" would have been a little better, although ultimately it was still a false statement.
I would also speculate about a separate motivation for "The beverages will be…": could this pattern with the unnecessary "located" in e.g. "The remote is located in the drawer"? I've thought that maybe "located" (and, now, "will") is supposed to facilitate processing for a listener, to rule out more quickly the excessive syntactic categories that can follow a BE verb ("The beverages will be here/free/coffee or tea/appearing/charged to your room").
GeorgeW said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:17 pm
FWIW, another vote for politeness marker. And, the politieness could be stepped up a notch with the past tense.
It is found.
It will be found. (when you look)
It would be found. (if you wished to look)
Philip Taylor said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:19 pm
I was going to say much the same as Gregory Kusnick, but would have proposed "can be found", since "will" implies some degree of prescience …
Philip Taylor said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:22 pm
And to Mai … I would have been inclined to reply (somewhat shortly) "I don't yet have an outgoing voice mail message — the message to which you have just listened belonged to my predecessor".
Lillie Dremeaux said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:35 pm
I heard this construction much more often in the U.K., where I lived 2015-2021. I recall asking a colleague whether a few food items in the office fridge were company-provided or brought in by individuals; her reply was "Those will belong to someone!"
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:46 pm
I broadly agree with Gregory Kusnick but note the classic problem of a passive-voice construction that is Vague About Agency. The sentence "the story … will be found on page 9" doesn't answer the obvious question "found by whom?" If it's thought of as a recasting of the similarly polite-to-officious-sounding "you will find the [relevant] story on page 9," it's a correct prediction about the future, at least given the plausible assumptions that you haven't yet looked at page 9 but will do so subsequently.
Re the politeness-market analysis, I think it's actually a little more complicated – "you will want X" is pushier, and thus less polite, than "you may want X," but obviously less pushy than a flat-out declaration that "you want X" (whether you realize it or not!) and I think less pushy than "you should want X," although why the "will" construction feels less pushy than the "should" construction is not immediately clear to me (i.e. my intuition is pretty strong on this but I can't immediately explain why it follows from more general principles). In sum, I think the idea is to find something that sounds pushier than "you may want X" but not move so far up the pushiness spectrum that the pushiness becomes counterproductive because it alienates the listener. An optimization problem.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:49 pm
I should note that "politeness-market" in my just-posted comment was a damnyouautocorrectism for "politeness-marker," but maybe it has possibilities that the behavioral economists will want to look into.
David Morris said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:13 pm
There's a Doonesbury cartoon to this effect, which I will have no chance of finding over breakfast (or maybe at all).