The Conversation (as) Project with Elizabeth Stokoe

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Conversation Analysis is a powerful tool that looks at large numbers of conversations to help build insights about what works and what doesn’t. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elizabeth Stokoe is a Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University, and shares some key insights from her excellent book, Talk, the science of conversation and her well-received TedX talk.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As she suggests in the opening quote, any conversation that you participate in has a landscape to it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What Conversation Analysis can do - and we are all conversation analysts, just not professional ones - is show us the texture of that landscape, and how to navigate the bumps in the road effectively.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One surprising idea I absorbed from Professor Stokoe is in this quote, when she says that:</span></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">“In a way, the best conversations might have some clumsy, awkward moments and through that way, you might move past it and into something more mutual”</span></em></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We know what is natural and easy because we know what feels clumsy. Seeing, accepting and moving past the clumsy can help us find a smoother path.</span></p> <p><strong>We are the Turns We Take</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elizabeth’s idea that we are the turns we take, that speech acts are real acts, is a powerful one. And so is her idea that non-responsiveness or silence in reply to an awkward turn can get things “back on track”. If someone comes in “hot” to a conversation an easy way to cool things down is to wait and let the person fix it themselves, as she says:</span></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">“People will figure out that they just did something that was a bit off and fix it.”</span></em></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What I really loved about talking with Professor Stokoe i