P.M. Forni, the professor and author who inspired the "Choose Civility" campaign in Howard County, is not one to break his own rules.

Forni returned a phone message the same day he received it, and asked courteously if he had called at a good time -- advice he gives as part of Rule 14: Respect Other People's Time in his 2002 book, "Choose Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct."

Forni, who teaches Italian literature at Johns Hopkins in addition to leading the school's Civility Project, currently is promoting "The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude," a sequel to "Choose Civility" that was published last year.

Q: Why civility?

Forni: We know that incivility has enormous costs in human misery and dollars, and there are enormous benefits in fostering civility in home and at school. ...

Hostility in any kind of circumstance is not good for your health, is not good for your sanity, is not good for the relationship you have with the other person. ... The reason these initiatives are so important is very easily explained -- social skills strengthen social bonds.

Q: What do you think of the reaction it has received?

Forni: I could not be more surprised. I still cannot believe how this idea, this very simple idea carried by my book, was received. ... I don't think I have a magical wand. I simply discovered an affinity for a topic that was becoming so important for so many Americans. ... Americans between the last part of the 1990s and the first few years of the 2000s have realized more and more that civility and incivility are quality-of-life issues.

Q: How do you quantify whether civility is increasing or decreasing?

Forni: That, I think, is the next stage. So far we have been so busy just promoting the activities that we have not thought in many cases to quantify the outcomes. ... We know very well that incivility is costly. What we need to find out more exactly is to what extent promoting civility is beneficial.

The big job that is ahead of us, and we are in the phases of early planning at the university, is a national survey, the most ambitious of its kind that's been attempted, to gauge the state of civility in the country, ... what (Americans) think the causes of incivility are, if they think things are getting worse or getting better.

Q: What has changed since you initially started promoting civility?

Forni: Civility has become a trendy word. I think we are more aware of civility as a quality-of-life issue than we were 10 or 15 years ago. Whether we are a more or less civilized society, I think that's difficult to gauge.

In many ways we are as a society less civil than 30 years ago. In other respects we are more civil. (As an example, Forni said, while people might be not as willing to give up a seat on a bus to a pregnant woman, people do not discriminate against women, minorities and disabled people in the workplace in the same way they once did.)

Initiatives like Choose Civility in Howard County help give a stage to civility. ... Many more people are aware and see more clearly what civility is and what it can do. Now we have to enlarge that circle of people who believe that civil behavior is good for society.

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