How to talk: some simple ways

Probably the simplest way to talk is simply to start saying things without really thinking about it. If you can trust yourself enough to get over the initial hurdle of your own silence, you will soon find yourself carrying on a conversation that seems to run itself, so little is your intervention required. Indeed, this is the way most people talk most of the time, and as soon as you get the hang of it, you'll understand why—its simplicity and ubiquity are matched only by its usefulness, and when employed, the talk that results seems perfectly natural and spontaneous—as indeed it is.

Sometimes, however, if you know what you want to communicate in advance, but are afraid that when you meet your interlocutor some of the details might escape you or you might fail to hit upon an adequately happy phrase to bring the right belief about, a two-step process suggests itself. This is more complex than the preceding, of course, but since the first step can be completely practically arbitrarily far in advance of the second, the amortized simplicity of the method is only slightly lesser. What one does here is plan out in advance the locution or sequence of locutions to utter, and in doing so one must bear one's audience in mind. What will he think if I say p? should be the question that guides the process, bearing in mind that what he thinks will in part depend on what he thinks you might be getting at! You'll be best able to get underway with this method once you're quite comfortable with the preceding; one tack to take might be reviewing previous conversations in your head to see how the utterances of the different interlocutors fit together. You want, in your planned utterances, to mimic the ones that, in the spontaneous conversation, brought about the right sort of beliefs—and of course you want to mimic them not only as regards the content but also as regards the manner of your speech, for if your interlocutor suspects that you've chosen your words with as much care as, in fact, you have, he will likely become suspicious (which means that you can employ such stiltedness strategically—but now we're getting into advanced talking).

Another simple way to talk is—if you'll pardon the expression—to spare your voice and let your fingers do the talking. Gestures, whether manual, facial, or whole-body, are often perfectly adequate to the task of maintaining one's part in a conversation, signalling interest, querulousness, questioning, anger, skepticism—a whole gamut of actions and reactions are available to the practiced gesturer.  (Not to mention sign language.)

I hope these methods, briefly sketched as they have been, are helpful, and in closing I'd like to caution against one technique that gets recommended frequently for helping one to talk, but never seems to work out well in practice, namely, that of imagining one's audience naked. The most obvious drawback here is, of course, that it offers no advice whatever to anyone who finds himself addressing an audience that is already naked, a state of affairs that is increasingly common. Are we to imagine that, in this case, one should imagine the audience clothed? Bosh. Furthermore, it is all to easy to imagine scenarios in which such imaginative activity is a great impedance to talking, at least to the production of the right sort of talk, because it causes strong passions of one sort or another to arise in the speaker.  Finally, even if those pitfalls can be avoided, it seems a recipe for distraction.

Comments

[Jeff Rubard]

I admire the theoretical parsimony of your position. Why make the profligate assumption that people knew this stuff already?

[horus kemwer]

Not the real waste, who would never write "all to easy": don't be fooled by this imposter!

[ben wolfson]

A mind too long engaged with simple subjects itself becomes simple.

[peli grietzer]

This clinches my "this is a blog from a parallel universe" theory*.

*Theory originally conceived to account for failing to recognize any referents other than Plato, Wittgenstein, Sophocles, Confucius. Obviously the blog's source-world was much like ours until the around 300 B.C, and Wittgenstein's existence is just metaphysically necessary (which is ironic).