Conversation isn’t something with a great deal of quality advice out there, everything is pretty spread out and there’s a lot of nonsense mixed in with the good stuff. This article dissects conversation to the basis of what it is. Interesting techniques for making a dull conversation into a better one are shown and methods for ensuring continuity are given.

How to talk

Confidence
People say that you should always speak confidently, I disagree, you should speak in whatever way best suits what you’re saying. For instance, do not feign confidence when talking about something incredibly personal to you. If you’re nervous about something, don’t hide being nervous of talking about it. BUT! Do not be ashamed about talking of anything. Shame shows a lack of personal confidence. It is perfectly ok to not be confident in anything else but you must be confident in yourself!

Eye Contact
Eye contact is important, but it’s important to use it correctly. Everyone else will say that you should always maintain eye contact and that it’s really important etc etc. That’s not true at all. You do not have to think about eye contact, there are times when you should keep it and times when you shouldn’t. Yes it can be incredibly powerful, I talked about it in my article on Politicians which is worth reading for a little more depth, but it’s not all that important. All you need to really do is make sure you don’t have an issue with looking disinterested(though there are times when that can be valuable). Do not get hung up on thinking about this in the middle of a normal conversation, just let it be natural.

Speak clearly
This one IS important. The other person needs to be able to hear and understand what you’re saying and what you say needs to come across in a manner that shows you’re not ashamed of what you’re saying. It needs to show that you have personal confidence. You must speak audibly and clearly, in a manner that is neither too loud nor too quiet, in order to do this learn to project your voice so that you are not being loud but are certainly clear. Your sentences must not trail off into nothingness at the end – a common trait in people with poor self confidence. Record yourself speaking normally and have a good listen to make sure.

Linguistics
There’s an entire academic field out there that’s dedicated to linguistics and has a wealth of information worth tapping for conversational theory. I’ll try to summarise some of the important fundamentals here:

Grice’s Maxims
Paul Grice was a philosopher who proposed four maxims of conversation. The Maxims are based on his cooperative principle, which states, ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’

It’s important to note that these are specifically rules of good conversation, not necessarily social interaction. Rules can be broken to positive effect socially, the maxims are specifically maxims based on the negative and positive effect upon the conversation that is occurring at that instant.

Maxim of Quality – Be Truthful
Essentially, do not say that which you know to be false and do not say that which you lack evidence.

Maxim of Quantity – Be detailed
Your response should neither be too short nor too long.

Vague or very short responses provide little for your conversational partner to respond to. This is a particularly flexible maxim socially, there are times when short or vague answers can be part of flirting, etc.

Maxim of Relation – Stay relatively on topic.
If someone says something and you suddenly change topic, it’s rude, it can turn a conversation negative or end it entirely.

This isn’t always a rule you have to keep, it can be a joke or teasing thing to do. Remember, Grice’s maxims focus on the conversation, not the social outcomes.

Maxim of Manner
Avoid obscurity of expression.
Avoid ambiguity.
Be brief.
Be orderly

To give example of this, I’m quoting wikipedia here:
A:
Can you take out the trash?
B Improper:
Well, it is probable that I would take out the trash more often if someone weren’t flagrantly wasteful, such that the majority of trash weren’t always coming from that person.
B Proper:
Yes, but we need to talk about how we are assigning the chores around here when I get back.

Grice’s maxim’s give us some fundamental basics of conversation, they don’t have to be followed at all times but they are at least a good guideline. Philosopher Kent Bach wrote:
We need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit. (Bach 2005).
These maxims may be better understood as describing the assumptions listeners normally make about the way speakers will talk, rather than prescriptions for how one ought to talk.

Equality
Linguistics also tells us equality is very important, when studied it has been found that the interactions in which people enjoyed themselves most and found most interesting were those where both people took equal part, both in number of exchanges and length of exchange. By this I mean that in each “turn to talk” the two people involved roughly had the same average length of time talking as one another overall and in group conversations people shared the same number of turns talking. Do not talk for too long, do not over command a group, ensure equal input or be aware that those without equal input aren’t enjoying the conversation (or invested) as much as they could be. Remember that a monologue is not a conversation, do not talk for too long.

Backchannel support
In linguistics backchannel support refers to responses we give to people in order to confirm our understanding of their statements and that we are continuing to listen and be interested.
For example: A listener will say “Mhmm” or “Yeah” many times while another person talks. OR a talker will say “Right?” or “You know what I mean?”. “Innit” and “yeah?” are also quite common in the UK. (Or any number of other qualifiers). Backchannel support is a good indicator of investment in a conversation, people who are heavily interested in the topic and/or person they are talking to will do both of the above a great deal.

Knowledge of backchannel support has the potential to be exploited, everyone seeks this support, it is a standard of the way we talk and interact with those around us. An easy method to create an air of confidence is to look at your own speech and find your prompts, eliminating these (although difficult due to their habitual nature) will improve how confident you sound. Not giving backchannel support to a talker generally projects that you do not agree/don’t understand what they are saying, this can provoke uncertainty and insecurity in them. It can also be used quite playfully. Many people do this quite naturally.

Prolixity
Or sometimes, Loggorhea. This is basically the use of too many words. I see many guys who lack confidence extend their sentences, descriptions, explanations, statements or anything else they might be saying with a bunch of unecessarily irrelevant extra words added onto the things that they were saying in a manner that wasn’t really necessary and somewhat a little bit redundant. (See what I did there?)
Don’t do it, it makes you look unconfident.

Silence
According to this study Awkward Silences: 4 Seconds Is All It Takes to Feel Rejected – TIME Healthland awkward silence causes feelings of rejection in the person who caused the silence. This is a fairly obvious concept, learn to be confident enough to not lose confidence due to silences, be they awkward or not. This can however be used to advantage also, you can create these silences in a playful manner in order to teasingly play with someone (obviously they’re the cause of the silence).

Filler
This is when people use a sound or word in order to fill silence to indicate to people that they have not yet finished speaking. Similarly to backchannel support it can be seen as unconfident in nature. Typical fillers are “Umm”, “Like”, “literally” and “basically” (those last two are usually eeelongaaated). Removing these from our speech can, just as with backchannel support prompts, create an air of more authority and confidence.

I’m not going into the very depths of linguistics in this article but for further reading on the subject I would recommend research into the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky as well as the philosopher and social psychologist B. F. Skinner.

What to say
According to “The Art of Conversation” by Milton Wright there are two types of conversation. Conversation for it’s own sake and conversation for some other purpose. Milton Wright posited that preachers, politicians, salesmen and the like use the latter. I disagree, men and women use this form too, conversing with the purpose of a conversation becoming sex. Companionship(getting to know someone better) and the exchange of ideas come under the former.

Milton Wright made basic rules of conversational topic. He said their were 4 instincts that could always be appealed to in converstion:
Attraction
Self-assertion
Pugnacity
Curiosity

He then went on to say that there were three that could only sometimes be appealed to:
Sex
Art
Acquisition

With the latter three, only certain people can these be appealed to and more discretion is required. There is a time and a place.

In choosing what to say you should remember the above things. There are however some specifics that are extremely effective. People love talking about that which they dislike, if you can find a person’s pet peeve you can be sure animated conversation will ensure, if however you disagree with them caution must be taken. People love imparting knowledge or telling others what they think of something, their opinion. Asking for their opinion or advice generally goes down well.

How to make sure you don’t run out of things to say

Many people dread this and it happens to them often. The funny thing is that it’s absolutely unnecessary and simply understanding the structure of things people say and the various cues within what they say for potential conversational topics makes it very easy to continue any conversation in any direction you’d want to.

Let’s start with an example exchange, we’re going to assume that the responder follows the maxims of quality and quantity here, giving a good response:

A “What’ve you been up to today?”
B “I [had to] [[drive] 180 miles] to [do a delivery] for my [boss]”

Within this response there are numerous cues [marked], each has potential to become a new conversational topic or an offshoot conversational topic of the current one. There are numerous potential ways to manipulate cues, the easiest is obviously to question further, this however can become something of an interview if overused. You can also offer your opinion, make a statement about one of the cues, challenge them, make a joke, tell a story, make a judgement and probably numerous others that I’ve never actually considered (or failed to stumble across while double checking facts for this article)

The following is a breakdown of cues and potential responses to them, by no means is this a complete list, just examples.

[had to]
This indicates a dislike for what the person “had to” do. This allows for an extra line of questioning on any of the other cues relating to why they disliked it.

[drive]
Statement: Did you know that 70% of accidents happen within 10 miles of home?

Joke(but could be a story too): Oh man, I had a bad experience driving this morning – Driving to the office this morning on the motorway, I looked over to my left and there was a woman in a brand new Porsche doing 65 miles per hour with her face right up against her rear view mirror putting on her eyeliner!

I looked away for a couple seconds and when I looked back she was halfway into my lane, still working on her makeup!!! It scared me so bad, I dropped my shaver, which knocked the sandwich out of my other hand.

In all the confusion of trying to straighten out the car using my knees, it knocked my mobile away from my ear which fell into the coffee between my legs, splashed and burned Big Jim and the Twins, ruined the damn phone and DISCONNECTED AN IMPORTANT CALL!

WOMEN DRIVERS!

Challenge: I bet you’re a terrible driver! (smile)

The addition of the distance adds extra options on the questioning why they disliked it, agreeing with a dislike of long journeys, giving your opinion, etc etc.

[do a delivery]
This allows for all sorts of assumptions about their job, jokes, teases, with the addition of [had to] you can extrapolate that it’s not part of their usual job description, etc etc.

[boss]
Does this need explaining further? Jokes, personal stories, complaining, agreeing, assumption of dislike of their boss, challenges for not being a good employee, etc. There’s a lot of possibilities.

Every response begets more possible directions for the conversation. Every further direction creates more directions. If a conversational path ever finds itself hitting a dead end simple pick up from a previous point and go from there.

Be result focused

When you’re a beginner you DO need to ensure that you think about what you’re trying to convey to the other person, what you want them to think of you, what the conversational line is saying about you and what emotions you’re illiciting from the other person. You do need to know whether you’re creating attraction, comfort or simply building friendly rapport. You do need to consider these things. A natural does not as they have enough experience to just do it naturally. Do not be worried if anything feels disjointed or unnatural at times, natural behaviour does not start off natural, something can not become natural behaviour without it first being something you’ve never done before.

Additions and disagreements welcome as always. Another one pulled from my blog.

Lot's of detail there Jay, couple good tidbits I got from that.

What do you think about American slang like "unfunny" and "awesome"?

PS

A very good interesting post,

It actually has made me think about what I convey in conversations, I do like to challenge women for playful banter or whatever, but I do find myself saying "like" and "basically" and "literally" ESPECIALLY when I'm giving any sort of presentation at college or work.

Backchannel support (I did not know there was an official name), i watched some chick flick film or tv show ages ago cant remember what, and they were showing that you can fake it, by saying things like "yeah" every 30 seconds, and nodding your head to show you agree, even if you don't give a shit. I think everyone does this naturally to some extent just to not offend someone by saying "shut up!" so they just listen instead.

I think now I'm single and will be on the lookout for some new girls, this is something I should definitely work on.

Also, RLAJay, I did not know you had a blog? Can you link it here? or PM it

Good stuff. I will try and digest it all when I have some free time this evening. Thanks dude!

PM'd. I told Jaz I'd keep links to my stuff to a minimum, my main page really needs a rewrite, it only redirects to course sales at the moment and the links to my blog are absolutely minuscule hiding in the footer of the page. I'm working on that because quite frankly, it's shit the way it is.