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How A Single Word Can Change Your Conversation
How A Single Word Can Change Your Conversation
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Jul 15, 2015 / Elizabeth Stokoe Advertisement
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I believe we can, and I’ve spent the last 20 years studying real talk from real
people talking to each other in real time. And while the linguist Noam Chomsky
once described conversation as a “disorderly phenomenon,” I can tell you that
it’s no such thing. Conversation is highly systematic and organized … and it tells
us an incredible amount about the power of language to shape our daily lives.
Take this ordinary telephone call between two friends, Nancy and Hyla,
transcribed according to the standard conversation analysis transcription
system, which includes intonation and the actual sounds being made rather than
just the correct spelling of a word (lines under a word represent emphasis and
different movements in pitch, the equals sign means that the turns are very
rapid):
On the face of it, this is utterly mundane. There’s no science here! Well, actually
there is. Conversation analysts have shown that, across settings including phone
calls, face-to-face encounters, Skype calls and even instant messaging,
conversations routinely contain three component pairs of actions: summons and
answer (the opening — lines 1-2); greetings and identification (for Hyla and
Nancy, just the sound of the voice is enough for identification — lines 3-4), and
initial enquiries (the ‘how-are-yous’ at lines 5-6).
Perhaps this seems obvious. But now let’s take a look at the start of a call
between boyfriend and girlfriend, Dana and Gordon.
Like Nancy, Gordon produces an answering “hello.” But rather than being met
with a greeting, there is instead a gap of seven-tenths of a second. For
conversation analysts, that’s enough of a delay to indicate trouble. Hyla and
Nancy spoke rapidly, with a tenth of a second or less between their turns. In this
instance, even though only one word has been uttered, we already know enough
to expect that Dana and Gordon are unlikely to proceed smoothly through the
next two pairs of conversational components. Here’s what Dana says next:
Dana returns the greeting, but rather than move into the “how-are-yous” portion
of the conversation, she asks Gordon a question. It’s not an innocent question; it
is antagonistic. As Gordon’s girlfriend, she implies that she’s entitled to know
where he’s been “all morning”; she’s been trying to get him “all morning.”
That we can pinpoint moments of trouble so precisely has big pay-offs when it
comes to understanding professional or workplace encounters. For example, we
can search for silences and work out had happened previously to produce it. In
my work with organizations from the police force to commercial sales teams, I’ve
been able to show practitioners which words and phrases are most effective —
and what does not work. Here’s a look at some of my more recent findings, as
well as a great study by a pair of American conversation analysts.
4. Any or some?
American conversation analysts John Heritage and Jeffrey Robinson examined
the impact when doctors changed just one word in a question: “any” to “some.”
The issue: Patients were frequently leaving appointments without voicing all of
their concerns, resulting in dissatisfaction and inefficiencies. One reason might
be that doctors’ opening questions, such as “What can I do for you today?”,
typically elicit only one concern. Recognizing this problem, medical school
training recommends that, after discussing the initial problem, doctors then ask,
“is there anything else we need to take care of today?” However, analysts have
shown that questions containing the word “any” typically receive negative
responses. In Heritage and Robinson’s experiment, one group of doctors asked
the “any” question; another used the word “some”: “Is there something else we
need to take care of today?” That small change showed a statistically significant
uplift in reported concerns. The finding tells us some other interesting things.
First, while not every “some” works, outcomes cannot simply be attributed to
style, personality or gender. Second, as with the examples above, it suggests
what language should appear in communication training.
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