Conversation Starter Sitemap

1. Talking Life - Our manner of talking is so important a matter, not merely for getting along in this life but also for reaching the next, that the most flaming of the Apostles, St. Paul, fiery trail blazer to salvation, declared, "Your manner of speaking must always be gracious, with an edge of liveliness, ready to give each questioner the right answer."1 I should like especially to call attention to his requiring "an edge of liveliness" in a good Christian's conversation! It pleases me to interpret this to mean that a fellow who never lifts a coin from his mother's purse, but who uses up fifteen and then-s to tell how he talked the "cop" out of a traffic ticket, has a mighty slim chance of wriggling through that biblical "eye of a needle" that is the gate of heaven!

2. Conversation Mechanics - Language is the instrument of conversation. Grammar is the correct use of language; rhetoric the wise and effective use of it; diction the choice and range of words. These are large and complicated subjects, which cannot be treated comprehensively in a chapter on conversation. Fortunately they do not need to be. Everybody who has had some schooling has had a good deal of training in the elements of all three. What is needed here is their mobilization for good conversation.

3. Voice and Diction - The people who in conversation make me feel most desperate, who make me want to cry "fire" in order to get out of the conversation or to get pep into it, are the well-meaning souls who talk too slowly, who stop, look, and listen before every word. They talk as slowly and deliberately about having gone out and bought a loaf of bread as one would if one had at midnight stealthily placed a homemade atom bomb under Fort Knox.

4. Good Conversation - John Locke, the English philosopher, said, "Before a man can speak on any subject it is necessary to be acquainted with it." We recall that Samuel Johnson said that for conversation "There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials." One cannot get out of a sack what isn't in it. Since conversation is the communicating of facts, ideas, and feelings, one must have them to talk them.

5. Special Gifts - The best all-around recipe for becoming a good conversationalist is simply learning much, experiencing much, thinking deeply and wisely. But just as all these need voice and rhetoric to express them acceptably, so a really superior conversationalist has certain other resources and talents at his disposal. These are needed to lift a conversationalist from good to superior, to promote him from a "B" to an "A."

6. Personality Adjustment - The good conversationalist must develop an approach to conversation, which involves a paradox. He wants to talk to please himself, and will talk for long only if he is enjoying himself, yet his whole approach must be that of trying to please others, not himself. Dryden the dramatist once said, "Who lives to please must please to live." Equally, the conversationalist must realize that anyone who loves to talk must talk to please others more than himself, or he won't be loved for his talking.

7. Do's and Don't's - After a person has fixed for himself the two principles of talking to please others more than himself and of being forethinkingly tactful, a series of important conversational policies follow naturally.

The paradoxical one is that to be an agreeable talker one must be a good listener. Good listening is as important to good conversation as the canvas is to the painting. Conversation being the most human of arts, a good talker should be about as much canvas as paint. It is not true, however, as many say, that silence of itself is better than talking. Active, sympathetic listening is a fine thing, but even then only as a complement to speech. If the Apostles had forever listened and never talked, there would be no Christianity.

8. Talk of One's Self - The person who talks unwisely about others may commit the greater sin, but the one who talks unwisely about himself makes the greater fool of himself. The gift of tongue holds no greater temptation than that of slyly glorifying one's self, and no surer way of achieving contempt. Few are able to evade this temptation altogether; for many it is the besetting fault of their talk.

9. Words in Passing - Just as in the matter of conversation generally our rule was to talk to please others more than self, so in life's daily routine or casual encounters the special watchword is that, in pleasing the other, one say nothing which will hurt a third, an absent one. Talking is divinely intended to pull isolated human beings into the human family, to draw mankind together into a brotherhood. It was not intended to split it into cliques or into conspiracies. A friendship must not be aimed at keeping others out, but to help those in it groom themselves for a still wider circle of friends.

10. Gossip and Small Talk - Normally when a company of people get together, conversation is first about the weather and one another, then about mutual acquaintances, then it narrows into shoptalk, or widens into "small talk." When two people get together, or a number of old cronies get together, the conversation too often tends to hover about mutual acquaintances. The Irish Digest carried this illuminating item:

11. Politics, Art, Religion - After the members of a group have come to know one another well enough through self-talk and small talk, a good conversationalist will try to get the conversation to a more significant level. The higher level is that in which people discuss not merely personalities, not merely facts, but ideas, theories, and attitudes. When we read in books that Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, and Reynolds had great conversation, that latter is what is meant.

12. Conclusion - While we think of eating as largely a pleasure, we know it is also the means of keeping us alive. Similarly we think of conversation as a satisfaction and amusement, yet do not quite so well realize that it is also the sustenance of our mental life. It is an ocean that never dries up, but which, when it stagnates causes a shriveling up of everything else, and which, when it ebbs and flows and pushes in all the streams and inlets, gives a livelier pulse to life everywhere.

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