7 essentials for improving conversations
Conversation isn’t taught in school the way writing and public speaking are, so we have to pick it up on our own, which is one reason there’s such wide variation in how satisfying our conversations are.
To complicate matters, conversing can demand considerable attention. We need to anticipate the information needed by other people, provide enough context for what we say (but not too much), and quickly accommodate changing subjects and differing perspectives. Managing all these factors successfully can be difficult. We do it, but often not very well.
Given how multifaceted and challenging conversation is, how can we consistently improve our talks? To answer this question, I turn to linguistics and psychotherapy—two areas of knowledge that offer rules and strategies for successful and meaningful dialogue.
Taking Turns
The most basic structural rule of conversation is taking turns, with a corollary that conversational turns should be similar in length.
If someone is dominating a conversation, then they are violating this basic structural rule. In that case, turn-taking can be encouraged with a direct request to the speaker for turn-yielding or with more diplomatic approaches. Inclusive observations work, such as “We haven’t heard from Joan in a while.”
Humour also works. When my father wanted to enter a conversation, he would say, “Stop talking while I’m interrupting.” He said this light-heartedly, and his disarming combination of self-deprecation and assertiveness prompted us to welcome his comments.
Staying on Topic
The flow of topics in natural conversation follows the given-new contract. We select familiar information from the immediately preceding comment (or one just before that) and add something new.
Conversation depends on people referencing given information. If a speaker says, “It’s been unusually warm lately,” and the reply is, “I want a lamb gyro for dinner,” that would be a new-new non-sequitur. One common pattern that comes close to generating a non-sequitur is using a small fragment of a given comment as a springboard for telling a personal story associated with that fragment. That can be okay once in a while, but a series of such free associations makes for a disjointed and unsatisfying conversation.
We also need to consider memory. Responding to a comment made 15 minutes earlier doesn’t work because that comment is no longer available in short-term memory.
Communicating Instead of Expressing
Basic communication requires an idea, a medium of expression (for example, talking), and someone to receive the expressed idea. If conversation transforms into thinking out loud without considering the receiver’s experience, it is no longer communication. It’s expression. Writing an email is communication; writing in a diary is expression.
In some circumstances, pure expression is permissible, such as venting about a frustrating day, with the recipients listening and serving as emotional support. But in most of these circumstances, the conversation should soon return to a give-and-take dynamic—otherwise, it can become a tiring exercise for listeners who are left only absorbing and not generating.
Observing in Addition to Conversing
Therapists not only listen to the words of their clients, they also observe the clients’ behaviour and attend to unvoiced cues about information being withheld or avoided. Like therapists, we can be participant-observers in conversation, spending some attention to read conversational cues.
When people want to talk, for example, they will lean forward, look at us, move a hand as if they want to speak, and begin trying to say something. When they grow restless with the conversation, they look away or down, fidget, repeatedly check their phone, or even get up. When these responses occur, it’s time to draw them in.
Allocentric and Egocentric Interactions
One fundamental difference between therapeutic dialogue and natural conversation is that therapeutic interactions are allocentric, and normal conversation is egocentric. That is, therapists take the perspective of their clients, whereas participants in conversations take their own perspective and assume that other people share the same perspective and possess the same knowledge.
The main reason for this egocentrism is that natural conversation is too quick and too demanding of our attention for elaborate perspective-taking. We strive to communicate effectively and evocatively, but we do so by extrapolating from our own knowledge and beliefs. Most of the time, perspective-taking in natural conversation is a shared delusion.
It’s not realistic or even advisable to alter the egocentric tendency in conversation, but it is helpful to be aware of this tendency and to integrate stepping back every so often and spending attention on perspective-taking.
Overcoming Overconfidence in Our Clarity
One result of conversational egocentrism is a tendency to overestimate our clarity. If what we say sounds clear to us, then we assume it’s clear to others.
In a study by Boaz Keysar and Anne Henly, participants spoke syntactically ambiguous sentences so that listeners would clearly understand the sentences as unambiguous. For example, speakers said, “Rick moved the grill under the porch” using intonation, facial expressions, and emphasis to convey that Rick took the grill and moved it under the porch, not that the grill was originally under the porch. Speakers then reported if they thought listeners understood correctly, and listeners reported which of the two meanings they understood. The results show that half the time, when speakers thought they were understood correctly, the listeners did not understand. And this overestimation of one’s clarity is a consistent effect.
Being aware of this overconfidence in our clarity can keep us vigilant about misunderstandings.
Seeking Balance
We are designed to talk and to talk about ourselves. Up to 40 percent of a person’s speech is about oneself. Talking about oneself activates the brain’s reward centres, so individual satisfaction often conflicts with allowing others to speak.
It’s helpful, then, to expend effort on balancing self-focus with the conversational needs of others. One effective way to achieve this balance is to ask open-ended questions, which also has the benefit of generating goodwill among the other participants.