Yesterday's televising of Supreme Court proceedings got me thinking about my attempts to use recordings to study courtroom language - and how conversation analysis had led my later works to focus on public speaking and presentation more generally. This is a continuation of yesterday's excerpt from 'Lend Me Your Ears':
… becoming an effective public speaker depends on having as clear
a picture as possible of the key differences between conversation on the one hand, and speeches and
presentations on the other. The most important of all of these is the dramatic
change in our motives for paying attention that occurs as soon as we stop
conversing with other members of the audience, and settle down to listen to the
speaker of the day. When I ask audiences if any of them ever find it difficult to stay
awake during speeches, presentations, lectures or sermons, a typical result is
that 100 per cent of them put up their hands. When asked how many have trouble
staying awake listening to what someone is saying during conversations, the
typical result is zero per cent.
The first statistic is proof that everyone knows that speeches and
presentations have a tremendous capacity for boring audiences out of their
minds, and that holding the attention of an audience is a major challenge for
speakers. The second statistic points to something that people know when they
think about it, but probably never give much thought to most of the time: most
of us have little or no trouble in staying awake while engaged in conversation
with a small number of others. This is because there are powerful incentives to
pay attention built into the way conversation works. And these incentives are
underpinned by implicit
rules that are not written down and formally taught, but are
understood by everyone capable of having a conversation.
One at a time
The most obvious feature of conversation is that we take it in
turns to talk: one speaker says something and, when that one’s turn comes to an
end, a next speaker starts, and so on until the end of the conversation:
Speaker A: ——————|
Speaker B: |——————|
Speaker C: |———————|
If someone else suddenly starts speaking when you are still in the
middle of your turn, it’s natural to feel annoyed. In fact, you’re likely to
regard anyone who trespasses on your space as ‘rude’ or ‘impolite’. You are not
only within your rights to complain, but are equipped with the necessary
vocabulary for referring to the
misdemeanour: the words ‘interrupt’ and ‘interruption’. When you
complain of being ‘interrupted’, you are
actually drawing attention to the fact that a basic, though implicit, rule of
conversation has been broken: only one speaker should speak at a time, and
others in the conversation should wait until the end of any current turn before
starting the next one.
Occasional failures to observe this rule may be tolerated, but
anyone who makes a regular habit of starting to speak in the middle of other
people’s turns soon finds that there’s a heavy price to pay. Your reputation will
go into a nosedive. At best, you’ll be regarded as impolite or inconsiderate;
at worst as a pushy, domineering
control freak who’d rather ‘hog the conversation’ than listen to
what anyone else has to say. If you’d rather not be seen like this, you have a
strong incentive to pay attention at least closely enough to know when the
previous speaker has finished, and when you can launch into a turn of your own
without being accused of interrupting.
Coming in on cue
The incentive to listen during conversations isn’t just a matter
of paying close enough attention to notice when a speaker gets to the end of a
turn, as there is another rule about when you can start the next turn. Fail to
get this right, and people will have another reason for wondering about your
manners and motives. You only
have to think of how you react if, after greeting someone with the
turn ‘Good morning’, the other person doesn’t reply at all.
Charitable explanations are that they must be half asleep, or
perhaps a little deaf. But you’re much more likely to start worrying about why
they aren’t speaking to you, what you’ve done to offend them or what’s gone
wrong with the relationship. So the only way to stop other people from thinking
such negative thoughts about you is to make sure that you start speaking before
the silence has lasted long enough to be deemed ‘awkward’ or
‘embarrassing’.
This raises the question of just how long you’ve got before the
silence starts to make things difficult? The answer is that you can’t afford to
let the silence last for more than a split second. Research into conversation
shows that silences of less than half a second are not only long enough to be
noticed, but are enough to start us thinking that some kind of trouble is on
its way. Studies of how people respond to invitations, for example, have found
that an immediate reply usually means that the speaker is about to accept,
whereas a delay of even a fraction of a second means that a refusal is on its
way. The same is true of the way people reply to offers of various kinds:
positive replies start straight away, and negative ones are delayed. So the
safest way of preventing people from getting the wrong impression is to pay
close enough attention to be able to start speaking as soon as possible, and
certainly before the silence starts to get embarrassing.
Showing you were listening
Another extremely important reason for listening in conversation
is that you have to be continually at the ready to say something that relates
directly to what was said in the previous turn. Even a small lapse in
concentration can cause you to say something that leads the previous speaker to
conclude that you had not been paying attention, are not in the least bit
interested in what they were saying, or that you are just plain rude. It often
prompts accusations, arguments and conflict – so much so that it may well be at
the heart of large numbers of domestic rows. If these could be traced back to
their original source, many of them would
surely be found to have started just at that moment in a
conversation when one speaker says something – or perhaps says nothing – that
gives their spouse or partner the impression that he or she had not been
listening.
The threat of having to say something
Conversational success and failure obviously depend on our
continually maintaining a very high level of attentiveness to what others are
saying. We have to keep listening closely enough not to interrupt, closely
enough to come in on time and closely enough to be ready to say something that
relates to the previous turn. In short, the ever-present threat that we might
have to speak next amounts to an extremely powerful incentive for us to stay
alert and wide-awake during a conversation. It also points to a fundamental reason
why audiences will be in a very much lower state of attentiveness when
listening to a speech or presentation.
(To be continued with 'Why audiences fall asleep')
