How to Be a Better Conversationalist Pt. 1
Finding your conversation style and ethic
Hello and welcome to Season 3 of The Ick! The social rulebook has been rewritten in our post-pandemic world—and it's left us wondering, “Am I doing this right?” With help from psychologists, linguists, and social scientists, season 3 of The Ick is creating a modern field guide to social etiquette and decoding the hidden architecture of human connection.
Being a good conversationalist isn’t only about skill. It’s also about compatibility.
Consider this stereotype: New Yorkers are loud and pushy. Deborah Tannen is an author, linguistics researcher, and native New Yorker. She describes having a dinner party with fellow New Yorkers, plus friends from California and London. The New Yorkers carried on conversation in their natural way, talking over each other animatedly. However, “the Californians and the Londoner felt that the New Yorkers had ‘dominated’ the conversation,” she writes, “but from our perspective, the others chose not to join in.”
Should the New Yorkers have been more accommodating? Should the non-New Yorkers have been more assertive?
The answer is neither. A key to becoming a better conversationalist is not changing yourself, but knowing yourself.
Conversation styles have similarities that map ethnogeographically. Compared to English, Japanese people speak faster, and use more “sync talk” (simultaneous talking). Indeed in a study, Japanese has the fastest response time compared to 10 different languages. Similarly, in Samoa, overlapping talk is so ritualized as to sound musical (linguistic anthropologist Alessandro Duranti named it “polyphonic discourse”).
However, other linguistic cultures value negative space. In that same study of 10 languages, Danish has the slowest response time on average. And Native American Apache and Navajo are known to employ much longer pauses and silences than English speakers.
These differences in style and ethic have major consequences. Even down to the millisecond.
“Tiny things like microseconds of pause can have enormous impact on your life,” writes Deborah Tannen in That’s Not What I Meant!, “These little signals make up the mechanics of conversation, and when they’re even slightly off, conversation is thrown off.”
Take heart, you don’t need to interpret every microsecond pause or ethnolinguistic signal. You just need to know your own conversation style. That way, even if you feel thrown off, you’ll have the tools to be a more understanding and responsive partner—markers of an excellent conversationalist.
Style vs. Ethic
As a journalist, I’ve done hundreds of interviews. My whole job is being a conversationalist. I also love linguistics and speak three languages, and over the course of my career traveling and researching I’ve developed a matrix. In my experience, if I can plot my interviewee somewhere on this 2x2 graph, I can better accommodate and adapt to them in conversation. This allows us both to feel more at ease, more legible, and more understood.
On the x axis is conversation ethic.
Your conversational ethic is about your values. What rules determine whether a conversation is “good” or “bad”? These values can include: whether interrupting is rude or engaging, what constitutes respectful listening, and how you handle disagreement and reciprocity. There are two conversational ethics: wait and interrupt.
On the y axis is conversation style.
Conversational style is how you engage in conversation. It's your default method of participating in dialogue, such as: how you take/give turns, your pacing and rhythm, how you build on others' contributions, and your energy level and expressiveness. There are two types of conversation styles: declarative and invitational.
Conversation style
First, let’s tackle style. The declarative conversation style announces their opinions or experiences, and expects others to offer their own. The invitational style tends to listen first, and ask thoughtful questions; they expect others to invite them to speak by asking questions in return.
Adam Mastroianni, author of Experimental History, has a great article discussing conversation styles. He defines the spectrum as “takers” and “givers”. The declarative style takes the spotlight. The invitational style gives the spotlight.
Mastroianni illustrates how these styles can be uncomfortably incompatible: “When the giver gives and taker takes, and giver gets resentful (‘Why won’t he ask me a single question?’) while taker has a lovely time (‘She must really think I’m interesting!) or gets annoyed (‘My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?’).”
The inverse is true when similar conversational styles meet. Invitational styles ask each other questions, giving the mic to each other in turn. Declarative styles take the mic from each other, building on each other’s statements collaboratively. Dialogue feels engaging, exciting, and smooth.
“Communication is a system,” Tannen writes, “Everything that is said is simultaneously an instigation and a reaction, a reaction and an instigation.”
When the system is running smoothly, the dance of instigation and reaction flows according to rules everyone believes and follows. Everyone feels heard and understood.
Conversation ethic
On the other axis: ethic, aka beliefs.
The interrupt ethic believes that listening should be active and energetic. Interrupters add their impressions alongside or over the top of the other person’s speech. They offer their own experiences (“That happened to me too!”) or reactions (“He said what?!”) as a signal of active listening. This ethic trusts everyone to participate, expecting them to chime in at will without waiting for invitation.
Conversely, the wait ethic highly values reciprocity and patience. They believe in a more egalitarian turn-taking style where one person offers their insights, and the others wait until they pause, signaling they’ve concluded their thought, before offering a response.
Tannen describes the interrupt ethic as “cooperative overlapping”. Similar to the Japanese ethic of “sync talk” or Samoan “polyphonic discourse,” Tannen argues that the New York ethic values fast response time and “participatory listening” (talking alongside the speaker). Pauses are awkward and should be avoided. A person who takes a long pause is considered disinterested—or even rude. I love this tweet thread from Anil Dash: “Not talking ‘with’ someone is like leaving them alone, similar to refusing to look at them when talking.”
On the other hand, the wait ethic values more time and space for silence. A pause isn’t awkward, it’s a sign of respect as the conversation partner gathers a thoughtful response. I loved this analysis of wait vs interrupt from LessWrong blogger Benjamin Hoffman. He attended St. John’s College which has a “tutorial” style classroom, “a totally different conversational norm” from how he was raised, where students discuss in a formal, Socratic manner.
“People were always expected to wait until whoever was talking was done. People would apologize not just for interrupting, but for accidentally speaking when someone else looked like they were about to speak.” Although it took a while to adjust, Hoffman says he became a convert. The new norm trained him to cut down his volume of words, but increase the information—for my LessWrong readers: he compressed entropy without reducing complexity.
Hoffman writes, “If talking at all is an implied claim that what you’re saying is the most important thing that can be said, then polite people keep it short.”
The interrupt ethic trusts that a person can continue talking at length and will be interrupted with responses or questions. The wait ethic trusts that the speaker will say a brief, deliberate thought and others will ask for clarification if needed.
Expressing your conversation personality
So what is your conversational style and ethic? Mapped onto a 2x2 graph, we get four distinct conversation personalities (but remember this is definitely a spectrum in all directions). I’m adding in a dance metaphor for some color.
Declarative Waiter: The "structured monologist"
This is like a soloist, they wait for their spotlight moment, have a clear beginning and end to their performance, and expect the respectful attention of their audience.Invitational Waiter: The "thoughtful listener"
This personality is like a choreographer, creating a conversational space for others, guiding with gentle cues, and maintaining a rhythm and structure with their thoughtful inputs and observations.Declarative Interrupter: The "enthusiastic contributor"
Think of this one like a dance battle. The speaker jumps into the spotlight when inspired, feeding off other people’s reactions. They interrupt with dance moves that build a collaborative, emergent dance form.Invitational Interrupter: The "collaborative builder"
This style is like a dance circle, it encourages spontaneous contribution. The dancer in the middle pulls others in after them, building and celebrating a collaborative and energized dance with a clear give and take.from Mastroianni: “When we’re all standing on the perimeter of an empty dance circle, takers are the martyrs who will launch themselves into the middle and do the stanky legg.”
Top right is going to be a loud, energetic conversation personality. And lower left is going to be a softer, listen-first style.
Be careful not to use these personality types as a judgment against yourself or others. One style is not better or worse. But compatibility is key. We are all raised in different cultures, which instill different linguistic styles and ethics. Use this matrix to understand whether your default mode is to take or give the spotlight. And when you sense a conversation is not going well, instead of giving up on your conversation partner as boring or brash, try to determine their conversational style, and how you could meet them in the give and take.
But what if—like the non-New Yorkers at Tannen’s dinner party—you’re an invitational waiter surrounded by declarative interrupters? You wait for an invitation into the conversation but it never comes. How do you adapt to someone’s style without losing your personality?
When there’s a lack of compatibility, you need to rely on your skills. Stay tuned for part two where we’ll cover affordances, response time, self-disclosure, and body language.
If you’re new here, don’t miss season 2 of The Ick, essays and podcasts exploring of the five senses, and season 1, a collection of embarrassing stories.
Sources and further reading:
Tannen, Deborah. That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships. 2013.
Lakoff, Robin, and Laurel Sutton. Context Counts: Papers on Language, Gender, and Power. 2017.
Another banger!!
This is such an excellent post! I have never encountered anything so well-written that explores the relationship between our ability to converse and compatibility. Thank you!