Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Thoughts on Conversation

haikujaguar shared two good links:
"Conversation"
"Active Listening"

However, I note this piece of flawed advice:
Also as a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull. So steer toward topics that involve human perceptions and feelings, and away from objects and things.
This is a matter of taste!  Some people prefer to discuss human interactions; other people prefer to discuss objects and abstract ideas.  (Based on my observations, women are more likely to favor interactions while men are more likely to favor objects, but this is not absolute.)  Plenty of people like some of each, but are interested or disinterested in particular categories of interaction and objects.  The key to a good conversation is to understand what the other person finds interesting.  If there is no overlap between the two of you, then you should stick to practicalities or you will just frustrate each other. 

My go-to source for communication is still Suzette Haden Elgin's The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense.
Tags: community, family skills, linguistics, networking
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  • 3 comments
synnabar

synnabar

July 26 2010, 18:39:43 UTC 10 years ago

I thought the articles were interesting too, but I agree with you - I love to talk about objects. While I also agree that "conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting", I get tired of talking about people all the time. Too often it veers into gossip which then often veers into snarky territory. I'd actually be happier talking about barbecuing - and food!
ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

July 26 2010, 20:25:10 UTC 10 years ago

Many of my favorite topics are about objects or abstracts: gardens, books, space exploration, linguistics, etc. Relatively few are about interactions, though one of my biggest -- religion -- can be. I quickly seek escape from standard girltalk topics such as who's dating whom and personal minutiae. I am not keen on gossip. Food? Sure, I'll talk about food, and recipes, and restaurants, and the challenge of trying to analyze what's on your plate and guess whether or not you could duplicate it at home.

Another odd thing about my conversational style is that it can be heavily unbalanced; if I'm not careful, other people can barely get a word in edgewise, and that's easy to spot. What's less obvious because it doesn't trigger as often is that I will quite happily prod an expert into talking and then just sit there gleefully soaking up the flood of information, and occasionally nudge them back into action if the stream slows. It's less common now because I know enough that finding someone over my head on a topic I love isn't easy, but it still happens. If I and my conversational partner have roughly equivalent knowledge on a topic, then the exchange is usually more balanced.

One of the keys to effective conversation that I've discovered is the need to be able to say something about a wide range of topics. So, I can make a useful remark about darn near anything that might come up. Outside my areas of expertise, that's likely to be a couple of open questions that will get the other person talking. Then I can just sieve out interesting bits to throw back and keep it going. For objects, there are base questions ("How does X relate to Y?") where you just fill in the details per topic. For interactions, there's a whole list you can just memorize ("What are your kids up to these days?") but I rarely use those.