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How to Write Conversationally: An (Almost) COMPLETE Guide with 18 Examples

by Henneke | 221 enchanting opinions, add yours? :)

She’s reading her draft post.

And she doesn’t like the tone of her writing at all.

Why is it so hard to engage her readers?

Helena is an expert in climate change, and she’d like to write in a conversational tone …

As if she’s explaining climate change to a friend while sipping an ice tea at the town plaza. The pigeons are strutting around her, bobbing their heads and pecking at the crumbs on the pavement.

But, somehow, her writing always sounds too academic, too formal, too difficult, too stuffy, too boring.

What can she do?

How to write conversationally

Some say …

Just write like you talk.

But it doesn’t always work like that.

Yes, when you write a quick email or social media update, it’s possible to jot down your thoughts as if you’re actually chatting on the phone.

But when writing long-form content or when you’re still figuring out your ideas, writing in a conversational tone is more challenging. A draft often sounds writerly, and you have to massage it until it becomes more informal.

As Elmore Leonard suggested:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Want to know how?

How to edit a writerly text

To turn a formal text into a friendly conversation, follow 3 steps:

Take out the writerliness

See techniques 1 – 4 below >>

Turn your writing into a conversation

See techniques 5 – 8 below >>

Add an air of casualness (optional)

See techniques 9 – 14 below >>

Shall I show you?

I. Take out the writerliness

The basis of conversational writing is a simple text so readers can follow your ideas with ease:

• Eliminate complicated sentences >>
• Avoid the passive voice >>
• Replace writerly words >>
• Use transitional words often >>

Here are some examples …

1. Eliminate complicated sentences

Complicated sentences are a sure sign of writerliness.

So, keep your sentences simple and mostly short. The occasional long sentence is fine—as long as each sentence is easy to read.

For instance, Elizabeth Strout uses a conversational tone in her book Lucy by the Sea , and she doesn’t shy away from a long sentence:

He was seventy-one years old then, but he, kind of, I think, must have been plunged into some sort of midlife crisis, or older man crisis, with the loss of his much younger wife moving out and taking their ten-year-old daughter, and then his half-sister’s not wanting to see him and his finding out that his mother had not been who he’d thought she had been.

When I read Strout’s sentence, it’s almost like I can hear her talk. Can you, too?

The sentence above is easy to read because it starts with its core ( he was seventy-one years old ) and then expands. Moreover, filler phrases ( kind of, I think ) add a casual tone.

So, the key to conversational writing is not to keep all your sentences short but to keep your sentences simple. Communicate your ideas tiny step by tiny step.

2. Avoid the passive voice

Pay attention to everyday conversations, and you’ll note that most sentences use the active voice:

I went to the shops to get the groceries. I cooked a colorful stirfry with lots of veggies and prawns. We had dinner together.

The passive voice feels more writerly, less natural:

The groceries were purchased by Henneke. A colorful stirfry was prepared, and dinner was eaten.

I wouldn’t say that. Would you?

So, if you want to sound less writerly, try to avoid the passive voice.

3. Replace writerly words

Only use jargon if you’re writing for an expert audience who use that jargon themselves, too.

Otherwise, please …

Skip the posh words and gobbledygook.

Use everyday words instead.

For instance, jeans manufacturer Hiut Denim describes what they do in short sentences, using simple words:

We make jeans. That’s it. Nothing else. No distractions. Nothing to steal our focus. No kidding ourselves that we can be good at everything. No trying to conquer the whole world. We will just do our best to conquer our bit of it. So each day we will come in and make the best jeans we know how.

Note the everyday expressions above: That’s it; no kidding ourselves; we will just do our best; our bit of it.

Not sure which words to use?

Think of a face-to-face conversation with one of your favorite readers. What words would you use then?

4. Use transitional words often

Soooo …

When we talk, we use transition words to string our thoughts together.

Those transition words tend to be simple: When, if, and, but, or, because, so .

However, when we try to impress with our writing, we use more writerly transitions such as: Therefore, in contrast, additionally, furthermore, nonetheless, thus, subsequently, in conclusion.

Copywriter Gary Halbert is known for his conversational style, and the casual phrase anyway is one of his favorite transition words. It makes his writing sound as if he’s chatting to you. This is from his book The Boron Letters :

So anyway, today I’m going to start by telling you about a little trick that will improve your copywriting.

Anyway, a couple paragraphs back I wrote: “and if you can find a way to use it, you can dramatically increase your sales volume.” Now, compare that to this: “and if you can find a way to use it, you can make yourself a bushel of money!” Isn’t that a lot more powerful? You bet! The words “dramatically increase your sales volume” do not even begin to conjure up the visual imagery of “a bushel of money.”

Transition words create flow and help readers follow your text from one sentence to the next.

Moreover, if you choose simple transition words and use them often, your text will sound more conversational.

II. Turn your writing into a conversation

The 4 techniques below are the essence of conversational writing:

• Remember who you’re writing for >>
• Address your reader with the word you >>
• Ask questions >>
• Add personal comments (optional) >>

Here’s how …

5. Remember who you’re writing for

Good writing is a conversation with your reader.

And to make your conversation meaningful, remind yourself who you’re writing for. Who are they? What do they want to know? What’s their reaction to your writing?

When they shake their head because they disagree, you can counter their objections. When they don’t understand a phrase, you can replace or explain it. When a question pops up in their mind, answer it.

It can be hard to write a first draft with your reader in mind. Just formulating your thoughts is challenging enough.

So, once you’ve written that draft, try distancing yourself a little from yourself as the writer. Try not to be too precious about your words, and read them through the eyes of your reader. How can you make your text clearer and more engaging?

The better you can imagine your reader’s reaction, the more engaging your conversation with them will be.

6. Address your reader

In a face-to-face situation, you talk a bit about yourself, right?

And you also address the person you’re talking to?

Well, it’s the same in conversational writing. You address your reader with the word you , and you talk a little about me .

For instance, Mark Manson’s blog reads like a conversation with his readers because he addresses readers directly. This is from a blog post about feelings :

Look, I know you think the fact you feel upset or angry or anxious is important. That it matters. Hell, you probably think that because you feel like your face just got shat on makes you important. But it doesn’t. Feelings are just these … things that happen.

If you want to have a conversation with your reader, don’t create a monologue. Use the words you and your more often than the words me , my , and I .

7. Ask questions

Questions are probably my favorite conversational writing technique . For instance, here’s how I open a blog post on editing a sentence :

Do you ever wonder how others edit their writing? Me, too. So, picture my delight when I came across a fabulous example of revision … By a bestselling author!

And I start the sales page for the Enchanting Copywriting course like this:

Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank sheet? Struggling to find the right words to sell without feeling sleazy? You’re not alone. Persuasive writing is probably one of the most precious skills anyone in business can possess. But at school, we’ve not learned the art of persuasion. We’ve not learned how to write compelling content. We’ve not learned how to sell without feeling pushy.

Want to engage your readers?

Ask questions. Ask them whether they’re struggling with the problem you’re helping them solve. Or ask them whether they’d like to achieve that aim you can help them with.

Of course, asking questions only works if you understand your reader and if you know what’s bothering them and what they’re dreaming off.

8. Add personal comments

I discovered this trick for conversational writing only recently …

Add a personal comment between parentheses.

This technique is not widely used but it works like a dream.

The following snippet is from the memoir It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort:

This is for people who have been through some shit—or have watched someone go through it. This is for people who aren’t sure if they’re saying or doing the right thing (you’re not, but nobody is).

Above, McInerny Purmort first addresses her readers as a crowd ( This is for people who … ); it sounds less conversational.

But then she adds a comment between parentheses, addressing her reader directly ( you’re not, but nobody is ). That’s when it feels she’s talking with you.

As we’ve seen so far, to write conversationally, first edit your text so it’s simple and clear.

Next, turn your writing in a conversation with your reader: Know who you’re having a conversation with, address them with the word you , ask them questions, and if you like, add personal comments between parentheses.

Lastly, there’s one more optional step …

III. Add an air of casualness

Not all conversational writing needs a casual tone.

So, think about your readers. What’s the right tone for a conversation with them?

Then, try the following techniques:

(this is a safe technique that almost anyone can use)

(uhm … maybe not for everyone)

< waves hello >

(in mucho moderation)

(if you muuuuust)

Let me show you some examples …

9. Use contractions

Contractions merge two words together. It’s what we do when we speak all the time.

For example:

Using contractions is probably the most common and easiest technique for informal writing.

10. Try interjections

For more casualness, try interjections such as Phew. Duh. Whoah! Yay! Yikes. Ugh.

I occasionally use interjections in my writing:

What’s the most boring punctuation mark? I used to think that award should go to parentheses. They seem to smell like math exams in sweaty classrooms. Ugh.

Has it happened to you, too? In your mind, you’ve composed your next article. Perhaps while walking your dog or on your commute. You feel excited, because you know exactly what you want to write, and you think your readers will love it. Yay!

Even Apple uses interjections sometimes. For instance, when they write about the iPhone 14 :

Water resistance. (Phew.)

Interjections are shortcuts to expressing emotions.

Use them in moderation.

11. Use filler words

When we talk, we use filler phrases to give us time to think or to add emphasis.

Filler phrases include: I mean, you know, actually, so, yeah, well, sure enough, here’s the thing, why bother, hang on, like.

Here’s how Sara Gibbs ends her book Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels :

Right . . . Well, it’s getting late and I’ve got to get dinner on. Ah, crap, you’re never going to believe that. You know I’m not the one who cooks dinner. OK, uh . . . I think my cat is asking for me. No? I have to go; my husband’s on fire. God. Fine, you’ve got me. I have no idea how to end this book. I’m as good as getting out of conversations as I am at instigating them. I will leave you with these words – which I recently blurted out before hanging up on a confused GP’s receptionist: ’K, love you, bye!

As Tony Hoagland points out in his book The Art of Voice , filler words can be key to creating a voice that connects. They can create a sense of warmth, of companionship. A voice sounds more real.

But, of course, filler words make your writing less concise. And, as you can sense in the snippet by Gibbs above, a lot of filler words make writing exhausting to read.

So, think about what works for you and your audience. And, also, read your writing aloud. Does it flow naturally or does it become exhausting?

It’s up to you to find the balance between being concise and being more chatty.

12. Add gestures

Your keyboard doesn’t allow you to put hand gestures into a text.

Or does it?

< shrugs shoulders >

So, this is the trick:

You can put hand gestures or facial expressions between angled brackets.

< raises eyebrows >

It’s like putting emoticons into words.

Angled brackets can also be used to < checks notes > create a pause in your writing. Here’s Ann Handley in a recent newsletter :

You think you have a handle on a problem or a situation or a topic. You sit down to write: hands hover over laptop, claws ready to clack the keys, itching to go! Let’s GO! < seconds pass > < is it a minute already? > Your mind wanders.

Putting gestures or other comments between angled brackets can add personality to your writing. But always consider: Is this the right tone for the conversation you’re having? Or do you prefer a more concise conversational style?

Oh, and if you don’t like angled brackets, you can use *asterisks* instead.

Or, if you want to create a pause, just adding an ellipsis (…) is a neat trick, too.

13. ALL CAPS

I’m a little hesitant to mention this technique.

Because it should be used sparingly. Very sparingly.

ALL CAPS is a bit like shouting.

But the thing is this: When we talk, we can whisper, or shout, or sing.

And we can’t do that in our writing.

So, how can we emphasize our words instead?

My preferred method is to choose stronger words: Emotional words (such as despair, joyful, enchanting ) or sensory words (such as dazzling, gloomy, prickly, sweet ).

But sometimes, you may want to use ALL CAPS for extra emphasis.

For instance, Ramit Sethi occasionally uses ALL CAPS on his sales pages, like here :

There are tons of books, courses, and articles about confidence. “How to be confident at work!” “How to stop being shy on dates!”, “How to make everybody at a party love you!” The list goes on and on. The #1 piece of advice in all these materials is: “Just be yourself!” VOMIT.

And Joe Tracini also uses ALL CAPS occasionally in his memoir Ten Things I Hate About Me :

I’m scared. Terrified, really. I’m scared of what you’ll think of me, because even though I don’t know you, I don’t want to disappoint you, and I am desperate to be liked by EVERYBODY AT ALL TIMES. (Seriously. If I’m in a shop and I think the person on the till doesn’t like me, I will spend the rest of that day thinking I’ve ruined their afternoon, then worrying and wondering about how I could’ve been a better customer.)

Used sparingly, ALL CAPS can mimic the emphasis you’d add to a couple of words when talking. It’s like raising your voice.

Moreover, research indicates that putting one or two words in ALL CAPS makes it easier to understand something at a glance.

BUT …

Using ALL CAPS for longer texts reduces readability.

So, be careful: ALL CAPS can quickly be too much, and your writing tone becomes shouty.

14. Elongate your vowels

Pleeeaaaase, explain to me …

Why do we drag out our vowels?

Elongating vowels creates a more casual tone by mimicking our intonation when we talk. You may think this technique is only for teenagers on social media but even Apple uses it on their website :

The looongest battery life of any iPhone. Ever.

And Wil Reynolds writes in a blog post about SEO and AI disruption :

SEO has been “dead” or “dying” since before I got started in 1999. Mayyyyybe it’s just an industry that changes a lot.

I sometimes elongate vowels on Twitter , too:

Pleeease … Don’t tell me to write like I talk. In writing, you can’t use hand gestures & facial expressions. So, writing has to be stronger than spoken language.

You can also lengthen certain consonants. Dammmmmnnn. What a messss.

So, this is an interesting technique, most commonly used on social media. Elsewhere, use in moderation or not at all. There is a risk your tone becomes unprofessional.

Always consider who your reader is and what tone is appropriate for your conversation with them.

How casual should your writing be?

Your objective is not to make your writing as conversational and casual as possible.

Think about the topic you’re discussing with your reader.

Consider your reader’s reaction and what feelings crop up when they’re reading your text.

Also, think about the context. Social media tends to be most casual, email comes next. And blogs tend to be more conversational than books but that’s also a matter of personal preference.

Sometimes, simple and clear writing is your aim.

Sometimes, you want to go a step further and turn your text into a conversation or make the tone more informal.

How casual is your conversation with your reader?

Cup of tea? Slice of cake?

PS This is a completely refreshed and expanded version of an article originally posted on January 14th, 2014. The new version was published on August 29th, 2023.

Recommended reading on conversational writing:

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Reader Interactions

Leave a comment and join the conversation cancel reply.

December 15, 2023 at 4:00 am

Thanks, for this very insightful post. I think that people, looking for guidance in their writing, will definitely not leave empty. I have personally gained useful tips and suggestions, that will help me in my writing. This post will add value to the newbie’s writing, like me, and even some of the more mature writers.

December 15, 2023 at 10:29 am

I’m glad you found it useful, Rupert.

October 31, 2023 at 9:46 pm

Faaaaantastic! Learnt LOADS. Thanks.

November 1, 2023 at 9:00 am

Yay! I’m glad it was helpful. 🙂

October 21, 2023 at 9:13 am

This made me laugh and all the tips are helpful. Happy Belated Birthday. It’s never too late to celebrate your beauty Henneke and to be grateful for all you are and all you share! You give me hope and inspiration and skill.

October 23, 2023 at 10:37 am

Thanks so much, Andrea. This was a fun post to write.

October 18, 2023 at 4:09 pm

For someone who has stalled on writing for a while due to so many things, bereavement being one. Reading this has truly inspired me, I’ve taken notes and I can’t wait to practice all that you shared. Very informative and useful tips. I believe you’ve just eased the burden I felt at the thoughts of going back to writing. Thank you Henneke!

October 18, 2023 at 4:56 pm

I’m sorry about your bereavement, Bukky. I hope you’ll get back to writing soon and will find joy in writing again.

September 11, 2023 at 3:33 pm

I haven’t even finished reading, and just have to say how truly helpful this is! Our company just rebranded our voice/tone, and “conversational” is our latest descriptor of how we should be writing (I’m a copywriter). I thought I knew how, but am quickly realizing how hard it is when writing about tech products. Thank you for making this so approachable and easy to understand. I have a post-it note handy with notes from your blog to keep on my desk! 🙂

September 13, 2023 at 6:58 am

Thank you, Marissa. That’s lovely feedback. Happy writing!

September 8, 2023 at 6:29 pm

Thank you so much Henneke. You’re a whole institution, trust me. 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼❤️🤗 Thank you

September 13, 2023 at 6:57 am

Thank you, Nnenna. I just enjoy writing, sharing and connecting with lovely people like you.

September 4, 2023 at 9:53 pm

Happy belated birthday, Henneke. I hope you’re feeling well. As usual, you never disappoint me with how you display your knowledge — much appreciated.

September 5, 2023 at 4:21 pm

Thank you, Dom. That’s lovely feedback. And I appreciate your birthday wishes.

September 4, 2023 at 10:07 am

Thank you very much Henneke for this long topic! I’ve already read the first version before and now I see new stuff you added. There is such information that I can’t remember all!! I feel I need to read that again from time to time to assimilate that. And Happy Birthday in late! 🤗

September 5, 2023 at 4:19 pm

Thanks so much, Alexandra. No need to remember it all. Just pick a new technique or two that appeal to you, and start practicing. When you feel you want to try something different, you can always come back. But you know that already 🙂

September 2, 2023 at 12:53 pm

Great read. In order to make the writing *even more* conversational, we might also use:

– emojis, to underline the message or suggest the opposite (yeah, right… 🙄), but used sparingly. – animated GIFs. Again, to make the point in a funny, relatable way. Maybe instead of writing gestures, we might show ’em 🙂 – larger or colored characters, to emphasize a short sequence of words. However, I’d use this technique sparingly, depending on context (I woulnd’t use it in B2B communication, but it’s ok when writing to young moms).

Apart from those, I think your list is all-inclusive 🙂

September 3, 2023 at 10:34 am

Thanks so much for adding these suggestions, Radu. Fab.

August 30, 2023 at 10:14 pm

Thank you Henneke for your precious article. Vero useeeeeeful! And… Happy Birthday from Italy. Maurizio

August 31, 2023 at 9:43 am

Sooooo glad you find this useful, Maurizio.

And thank you for your birthday wishes 🙂

August 30, 2023 at 8:37 pm

Thank you! Happy Birthday!🎉🎊🎈🎂

August 31, 2023 at 9:42 am

Thank you so much, Shauna. 🎉

August 30, 2023 at 4:31 pm

Hi Henneke, Very handy article. I love all the different ways you have picked up on to make writing sound like a real conversation – all the umms and errs. And you’ve made me realise that although I say ‘anyway’ all the time, I would never dream of writing it. So now I need to think about that, along with so and however. Thanks.

August 30, 2023 at 5:11 pm

It’ll probably be interesting to experiment and see whether you like it when you add “anyway” to your writing, and what frequency feels right.

Writing will never quite be the same as speaking. It’ll always be more concise, more structured, and a little stronger. But when we allow ourselves to be a bit more conversational, we can let our personality shine through a little more.

happy writing!

August 30, 2023 at 8:29 am

Happy birthday!

Brilliant piece; saved for future reference. Thank you.

August 30, 2023 at 11:08 am

Thank you so much, Beverley. Happy writing!

August 29, 2023 at 9:25 pm

I just finished a youth book on the 23rd Psalm that’s woven in a young girl’s life while studying it. She narrowly survived bullets randomly fired at the March 6, 2023 shooting in Allen Texas, at the Outlet Mall.

I’m mostly pleased with the book, but wished I had read—no studied, this article before starting. I tried to make the book conversational. I doubt that I succeeded. Do I rewrite with this article in mind? Probably not, since the parents of the girl have approved it. BUT, this will be a go-to on my next book.

Thanks for this article. It truly is helpful

August 30, 2023 at 11:10 am

I think that’s a wise decision. It’s easy to be tempted to keep improving a book but as it’s approved already, it’s probably better to start your next project.

Best wishes to the girl who survived the shooting.

August 29, 2023 at 8:04 pm

This is not a blog post.

But a Bible on conversational writing.

What else can I say?

Best wishes,

August 29, 2023 at 8:41 pm

As I was working on it, I was wondering whether it was bit too much!

August 29, 2023 at 5:49 pm

This landed in my inbox at the perfect time. Have a first draft of my next newsletter and it reads kind of stiff. Ugh. Your tips totally inspire me to bring it to life. Thanks, Henneke.

August 29, 2023 at 6:16 pm

Yay! That makes me happy, Fiona. Thank you. Happy editing!

August 29, 2023 at 12:54 pm

I started and couldn’t stop reading your article. And, I missed my train. Not to worry, I gained more from your item than my meeting with the bank manager. Thanks. Is it OK to use conversational writing on my website pages?

August 29, 2023 at 1:01 pm

Oops. I’m sorry you missed your train!

And yes, you can use conversational writing on your website. Just consider who is reading your website and what the right tone is to engage them.

April 18, 2023 at 12:09 pm

Hi, Can you share if a conversational tone can be used in a coffee table book?

April 18, 2023 at 4:01 pm

Sure. Why not? It depends how you want to position your coffee table book.

October 21, 2022 at 5:47 pm

You got me in awe! I just can not stop myself from reading it till the end + I want to read more !

October 22, 2022 at 4:23 pm

Thank you, Shafeeq. That’s a lovely compliment 🙂

August 12, 2022 at 1:03 pm

Great tips for chatting through writing.

Way too many bloggers and online marketers forget that human beings sit on the other side of the computer or phone. There are other humans out there reading our content and engaging us from their laptops and phones. Keeping this idea in mind urges me to be chatty, to write how I speak and to converse with fellow human beings by a Blogging From Paradise, my emails and through social media too.

We want to chat with people online not speak to them.

August 12, 2022 at 4:26 pm

Yes, so true. Conversational writing is not just for blog writing, but also emails and social media. It even works for books!

April 27, 2021 at 3:05 pm

Beautiful flow. Your message arrives home with perfect clarity and conciseness. Thumbs up Henneke.

April 27, 2021 at 6:56 pm

Thank you, Deniz. Happy writing!

September 18, 2020 at 5:18 pm

Do you have any YA novel suggestions which are written using conventional tone. I would be very interested in this. Thanks

September 18, 2020 at 5:40 pm

I don’t read a lot of YA novels. The only one I can remember reading “recently” is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I read that almost two years ago but if I remember correctly, that used a conversational tone. I’m sure there are many many more.

August 29, 2020 at 6:55 pm

This is great. I just wrote a conversational piece today. I wanted to double check if I was on the right track. This post was insightful.

I have jotted down points like checking if it looks like writing. I am going to revisit the piece tomorrow with fresh mindset and your overall tips.

Thank you so much. This was a great read and helpful in a practical way. 🙂

August 29, 2020 at 8:08 pm

I’m glad this has been helpful to you, Kavya, and I like your idea of revisiting your writing tomorrow (rather than today) to check whether it sounds like writing. Happy editing!

August 27, 2020 at 6:43 am

Wow! The post itself is written in a conversational tone. Flows well and easy to connect with. Thanks for this.

August 27, 2020 at 12:13 pm

Thank you, Martin. I’m glad you enjoyed this.

August 5, 2020 at 3:58 am

I love this! It guided me to a nice, relaxed way of blogging. This approach will allow readers to get comfortable on my blog.

August 5, 2020 at 9:39 am

Thank you, Tayler. Happy blogging!

June 29, 2020 at 4:17 pm

That was a real good post about writing good stuff.Writing is an art and you are an artist in true sense.Your writing style kept me hooked till end of the article.And I was compelled to write a comment to you. Way to go ??

June 29, 2020 at 6:20 pm

Thanks so much for your comment (and your compliment!), Preeti 🙂

June 1, 2020 at 6:24 pm

That’s great!! I think you are a fantastic writer , I like this. Good writing has a strong voice, where you can hear the writer as if they were talking to you.

June 2, 2020 at 12:55 pm

Thank you, Amit. Happy writing!

April 23, 2020 at 11:40 am

I never knew before that writing something, that too conversationally also exists. I meet new people everyday as a part of my job. I love talking to new people. And yes, asking questions definitely gets the other person involved. Thank you for such an awesome topic. I hope these tips will help me better in effective communication with my clients. Thanks and keep on giving us more.

April 23, 2020 at 12:26 pm

Asking questions is a much underrated skill. I’m glad you’ve discovered the power of questions already. Thank you for stopping by, Mihir.

March 9, 2020 at 10:19 am

I accidentally clicked on the link to your site, I liked it very much . Signed up for your free course.

March 9, 2020 at 7:35 pm

I hope you’ll enjoy the snacks, Sergey! Thank you for joining 🙂

January 24, 2020 at 5:44 pm

I loved the way you presented the ideas. I am a fan of your writing thank you. I bookmarked this post so, I can read it daily and improve my writing skills.

January 26, 2020 at 10:04 am

Thanks so much, Vijay. Happy writing!

November 28, 2019 at 11:35 am

This is amazing….!! I just got a reply from a company to write casual content, I was so confused… How am I going to do… but now I feel a little bit confident… I hope I can write well… Wish me luck….:)

November 28, 2019 at 4:56 pm

I’m glad this post is useful to you, Sandhya. Happy writing!

PS Consider asking your client for examples of conversational writing they like because the interpretation of what kind of writing is conversational may differ from company to company.

November 14, 2019 at 5:46 am

Hi Henneke,

Thank you for providing us with these useful writing tips. I often struggle with making my technical content look more informal and interesting but haven’t succeeded. With your tips, I am sure I can improve gradually.

Thanks and keep on giving us more

November 14, 2019 at 7:41 pm

I’m glad you found this useful, Amos.

Especially with technical texts, it can be useful to edit with your reader in mind. If the reader is an expert, it’s fine to use technical terms because they’d use those terms in a conversation, too. But if the reader isn’t, then it can be hard work to simplify your text to make it understandable.

Thank you for stopping by. I appreciate it.

September 11, 2019 at 7:30 am

Beautiful tips. I spend half of my day reading your tips… You are seriously to the point and have informative tips. I love it. I write small blogs but with long sentences and I learn a great deal of munching wisdom about how to clean up my writing. I think I will make a few changes in my website. I love your recipes….

September 11, 2019 at 8:25 am

Thank you so much, Jim. I’m delighted you’re enjoying my blog. Happy writing! 🙂

May 13, 2019 at 11:50 am

Cut the “writerliness” — now I have a name for this!

It feels like you live in my head (in a non-creepy way, of course) because when I revert to using passive voice or pompous-sounding words, I can almost hear you saying, “You might want to change that ?”

Thanks for your example from Ann Handley’s newsletter, I really enjoyed reading her conversational tone.

May 13, 2019 at 6:28 pm

I’m glad I don’t sound creepy when you hear me suggesting a change 😀

The word “writerliness” isn’t in the dictionary, but I think we should get it added 😉

Happy writing!

March 7, 2019 at 3:39 pm

Thank you Henneke. I love it.

March 7, 2019 at 7:03 pm

Thank you, Firdaos.

March 7, 2019 at 1:50 pm

I think a conversational tone works really well for blogs and other types of writing.

I think voice is the key to a good writer, and it is not exactly the same thing as tone. Good writing has a strong voice, where you can hear the writer as if they were talking to you.

Yes, voice is not the same as tone, even though many people use them as synonyms.

If you’d read a transcript from an interview with me, you’d notice that I talk quite differently from the way I write. It’s not like I’m a different person when I write and when I talk, and you can recognize the same personality—no matter whether I talk or write, but there’s still a big difference in the way I write and talk. Unfortunately, it’s hard to edit your talking. 🙂

March 7, 2019 at 12:12 pm

I’m hooked. Each of your articles is helpful. I love your work. Thanks.

March 7, 2019 at 12:19 pm

Thank you, Olusegun. Happy writing!

March 4, 2019 at 3:47 pm

I had read this earlier. I came back to read it again 🙂 This gold!

The first place I ever heard of ‘writerliness’ but it makes a lot of sense.

March 4, 2019 at 5:45 pm

Writerliness isn’t in the dictionary. I made it up. But writerly exists and simply means “of, relating to, or typical of a writer” (according to Merriam-Webster). So, the meaning I use is a little more specific, but it seemed the best way to express this idea that writing has specific characteristics that make it sound like writing.

Thank you for coming back to reread and comment 🙂

February 26, 2019 at 11:39 am

Love this!!

I especially like the advice about counting how many times i mention; me, I & us.

You are spot on, i’m going to keep the reader in mind as much as possible, i wanted to be the best conversationalist possible!

February 26, 2019 at 2:53 pm

Thank you, Nick. And nice to see your picture now! 🙂

February 24, 2019 at 5:52 pm

Excellent advice, Henneke. Your conversational tone kept me reading. Many blog posts lose me after the first couple of paragraphs.

February 25, 2019 at 4:56 pm

I’m glad I kept you reading. Thank you for stopping by, Kathy 🙂

February 23, 2019 at 7:31 pm

I love this post! I enjoyed how you made your points come across. Thank you, Henneke!

February 23, 2019 at 7:34 pm

Thank you, Hank!

February 22, 2019 at 5:41 pm

Great post! I adore your writing style and generous tips for those of us wishing to improve our communications. I recommend your blog to my clients. Thank you for all that you do and share. Breathe joy!

February 22, 2019 at 7:26 pm

Thank you so much, KC, for your lovely comment and for recommending my blog to your clients. I appreciate it. Happy writing!

February 21, 2019 at 4:04 pm

Came here from LinkedIn. Now I know what you meant by the tea remark. An amazing article Henneke. You’ve broken down such a complex problem into the simplest form possible. And like always, your artworks are amazing.

February 22, 2019 at 10:39 am

Yes, we’re all having tea together here. I’m glad you were able to join, too. Thank you for stopping by 🙂

February 21, 2019 at 9:06 am

Hi Henneke Great post. I am writing a conversational piece at the moment and found this very helpful. Thank you. Sue Kingham

February 22, 2019 at 10:29 am

I’m glad this was helpful, Sue. Thank you for stopping by 🙂

February 21, 2019 at 4:41 am

Wow it does not seem that long since I read a similar advice, from you, crazy how four years can seem like four months. or was it fife month? I do love your posts about quitting the fancy writing, I’m certainly not that fancy type. Thank you Henneke

It was actually five years ago when I posted the original version. I can hardly believe I’ve been writing here for so many years. Crazy, eh?

February 20, 2019 at 3:18 pm

I, too, have read this one before, felt inspired and benefited, and commented already. But. This time you really got through to my “straight A+ in English” brain. How did you do that? 😀 So, thanks very much for the re-do, and … … I noticed Henrietta is sitting on the “h”. So I’d be one seat beyond, on the “k” when I read, here. It really felt that personal. <3

February 20, 2019 at 7:41 pm

Yes, the K is there waiting for you—I drew it in the last picture. And you can put your feet on the M if you like. Shall I make you a tea or a coffee? 🙂

February 20, 2019 at 4:39 am

Good reminder Henneke – conversational writing also very apt for how-to books. Paul, wet and steamy Sydney

February 20, 2019 at 9:30 am

Yep, conversational writing works for books, too. It seems that blogs (and email) have spearheaded to drive to conversational writing but it’s used more and more in books, too. Stay cool!

February 20, 2019 at 3:21 am

What a fantastic article, brilliantly summing up the topic. A perfect snapshot of the copywriter’s job. Love the infographic!

February 20, 2019 at 9:29 am

Thank you so much, Kate. I enjoyed drawing the pictures of Henrietta and her ideal reader on the typewriter 🙂

February 19, 2019 at 11:45 pm

Yes, this is what conversational feels like. I find myself learning to write shorter posts these days. This was certainly a great read. I have shared with my team, I shouldn’t take in the awesomeness alone.

February 20, 2019 at 9:28 am

Thank you so much for sharing this with your team, Mary. I appreciate it. Happy writing!

February 19, 2019 at 10:49 pm

I’ve read this post before, but I love it and totally concur. I picked up something new this time. Your distinction about writing as you write rather than as you speak got my attention this time. I hadn’t picked up on that before, but it really makes a lot of sense. Going forward, I think that will be very helpful in my writing. Thanks for yet another great idea.

That point about conversational writing not being the same as writing as you speak wasn’t worked out in the old version. I expanded it quite a lot. (And I also edited it so it sounds more like the way I write now rather than five years ago.)

Thank you for stopping by again, Gordon!

February 19, 2019 at 10:29 pm

Your email arrived in my Inbox at precisely the right time . . . when I am beginning to overhaul my Web site. Good reminders of how you can win over business not by being formal and intellectual, but by being more concise and casual. Thank you appearing in my life.

February 20, 2019 at 9:26 am

I’m glad this email arrived at the right time. Good luck with overhauling your website! Such projects can feel a bit intimidating.

February 19, 2019 at 10:09 pm

Hi Henneke I loved this, however, when I went to say thank you in the comments I felt like I missed a really good part FIVE YEARS AGO. I have so many writing hang-ups at the moment, this helps at least one.

love alwaz mike

February 20, 2019 at 9:25 am

I’m sorry you missed out five years ago, but I can reassure you this new version is a lot better! 🙂

Do you have any specific writing hang-ups I can help with?

February 19, 2019 at 8:29 pm

Brilliant, Henneke! I read many copywriting and business books but few write as well as you do. The list of these writers such as Dan Kennedy, Ted Nicholas, Seth Godin, Drayton Bird and many others simply don’t write as clearly and succinctly as you do. Robert Ringer and Andy Maslen aren’t among those – they write well and are always interesting. It seems to me that ‘if it isn’t interesting it won’t be informative’ (don’t know where I read that!). Thanks again.

February 19, 2019 at 8:38 pm

Wow. That’s a big compliment. Thank you, Paul ?

February 19, 2019 at 6:35 pm

You always hit the nail on the head–wham! Also want you to know your Enchanting Marketing “class” is proving so helpful. I write fiction stories not content marketing but believe me, I appreciate the help you give. Besides, your book recommendations are terrific. Don’t know how you’re able to do so much and give so generously to so many hungry birds! (I’m allowed one exclamation point–right?)

February 19, 2019 at 8:37 pm

I’m so happy to know that you’re finding the Write It, Don’t Fight It course helpful! Thank you so much for stopping by, Patrica. I appreciate it.

February 19, 2019 at 4:01 pm

I so agree, Henneke! Writing that feels conversational is still writing. It still takes work! I used to think, to warm and friendly, just transcribe a real conversation. That did not work! My transcribed interviews just seemed to lay there like a sack of potatoes. Your editing steps are essential! They’re like the chopping and cooking that turns a heap of words into something wonderful (like french fries). Your article says it best. A conversational tone is deliberate. It’s your choice of a few deft cuts, some heat and some sharp sensory spices that delight eaters – er – readers like me.

February 19, 2019 at 5:35 pm

I read a book a couple of years ago. It was a business book but the author also writes poetry which surprised me because the book didn’t feel like it was written by a poet who appreciates words. There was something lazy about the writing. Later I discovered that he’d dictated the book. Dictating helped him overcome writer’s block. The editing was pretty good so it wasn’t noticeable at first but still it something was slightly “off.” So, yes, as you say, the conversational tone is deliberate and takes some work.

Thank you for stopping by, Joanne!

February 19, 2019 at 3:18 pm

What can I say? Written so nice and concise. Pour me another cuppa!

February 19, 2019 at 5:32 pm

Coffee or tea? 🙂

February 19, 2019 at 1:33 pm

As always, Henneke, a wonderful post. I love the freshness of your post structure. So different to the Google formula of H1 to H10 or whatever.No table of contents or video as is deemed so vital by big bloggers. Thank you for an entertaining post.

February 19, 2019 at 2:19 pm

Thank you for your lovely compliment, Poovanesh. I prefer to put my readers first (and I’ve found that works quite well for Google, too).

February 19, 2019 at 1:30 pm

Nailed it! Your drawings drive the point home perfectly. (And, of course, I ❤️the ?!) ?

February 19, 2019 at 2:18 pm

The dog loves you, too 🙂

February 19, 2019 at 1:22 pm

Very inspiring. Thank you.

February 19, 2019 at 1:26 pm

My pleasure 🙂

February 19, 2019 at 12:51 pm

Brilliant as usual Henneke. Thanks for the salient reminder. I guess you could say: “Don’t be boring!”.

February 19, 2019 at 12:56 pm

Yes, that helps, too. 🙂

Good to “see” you again, Ray!

February 19, 2019 at 12:23 pm

Henneke, you’ve come up with another Classic. It’s on my wall. In front of my desk.

And it’s the first thing I read every day.

And while you at it, thank Kerstin for me.

February 19, 2019 at 12:26 pm

Conversational writing is one of my favorite topics. I was nervous about revisiting the old post but I’m glad I did (and it changed more than I had envisioned). 🙂

Thank you for your comment, Lee, and happy writing!

February 19, 2019 at 11:56 am

I felt like your favourite reader, so you nailed it. And I’m looking forward to drink tea with you one day .. ha ha (but not kidding). Your imagery is so funny e.g. “Send difficult words to the naughty corner and throw a party for simple words.” Ha ha. All the best, Tine

February 19, 2019 at 12:14 pm

One day we’ll drink tea together! 🙂

February 19, 2019 at 11:49 am

Henneke you know your stuff

Thank you, Jacqueline. 🙂

March 21, 2018 at 5:30 pm

I thank you very much and love everything you send me, I love illustration and I will not forget it.

March 23, 2018 at 11:51 am

Thank you, Samar. Happy writing!

February 12, 2018 at 3:28 am

Good Article and explained nicely, what needs to be taken care to make the writing as conversational writing

February 12, 2018 at 9:51 am

I’m glad you enjoyed it, Harish. Happy writing!

September 9, 2017 at 11:38 am

This post is great. The point about short paragraphs is the one that resonates most with me.

I hire a professional writer to write our blog, and at times, I have to go in and break up 6-10 sentence paragraphs. I hate seeing it!

The web and content format is changing so dramatically, nobody wants to read a wall of text these days!

February 16, 2017 at 7:28 pm

This is an excellent article. I’ve just noticed that I use exclamation rather than questions far too much in my writing. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong?

February 16, 2017 at 9:29 pm

Thank you for stopping by, Derek.

April 25, 2016 at 5:08 pm

Just a suggestion: maybe you can add some definite heuristics as well.. such as some effective techniques that have been proven to work.. say for reducing content length, I’d say change from “in order to” to just “to”.. something like that

March 11, 2016 at 3:58 am

Great tips! I’ve just one question: how do you handle clients who insist that conversational writing is not ‘professional’? Had a recent client who insisted, in a snooty curl-in-the-lip manner, that they are a premium brand dealing with professional readers, and so things like contractions, short sentences, using 1st/2nd pov etc. are improper.

Problem is, the style they want would bore even the most stone-hearted tax accountant to tears :-/

I suppose my real question is: Can premium B2B branding still be portrayed through a more humane, conversational writing?

March 14, 2016 at 10:11 pm

Yes, that’s tricky. You still have to respect the brand voice, even if you don’t agree with it. With some clients you can adjust the guidelines for tone of voice, but others are pretty set in their ways.

To me, B2B is also writing for people, and yes, it can be portrayed in a more conversational way of writing, but not all brand managers like that. Of course, depending on who you’re talking to, your language may be more technical as you write using the same terms your audience uses.

January 19, 2016 at 4:51 pm

Hi there! I have always been hesitant to use “you” as it may sound preachy. Everyone I talk to says it’s best to write in 1st person. What do you think?

Also, agree on white space and editing. So much easier to read.

Learning forward!

January 19, 2016 at 5:02 pm

I use “you” a lot in my blog posts, and it doesn’t feel preachy to me 🙂

September 18, 2015 at 1:21 pm

Going through the comments section I realized that I went through a lot of conversational writing. Most of the writers were perhaps not aware of it. Awesome post 🙂

September 18, 2015 at 2:27 pm

September 3, 2015 at 2:44 pm

Thank you Henneke, this post is going to help me begin my blogging journey!

September 6, 2015 at 2:29 pm

Great! Happy blogging!

August 19, 2015 at 5:49 pm

Thank you Henneke, this is a sweet post. I already hankered for more.

August 19, 2015 at 6:56 pm

Thank you, Felix. Nice to meet 🙂

Happy reading!

April 17, 2015 at 1:13 pm

Beautiful tips. I spend half of my day reading your tips… You are seriously to the point and have informative tips. I love it. I write small blogs but with long sentences and I learn a great deal of munching wisdom about how to clean up my writing. I think I will make a few changes in my website. I love your recipes…. 🙂

April 17, 2015 at 1:24 pm

I love your phrase “munching” 🙂

Happy reading and happy writing!

July 14, 2014 at 7:41 am

Yes, thank you for your answer and for the examples!

July 13, 2014 at 7:31 am

Hi Henneke, I totally agree with you on this. But I’ve got a question: I’m working for a Dutch university. One of my tasks is to write texts for the university website. My target audience are prospective students. I would love to change the way we, as a university, talk to our readers. Because, frankly, I think all our copy is totally boring, generic and abstract (“Are you innovative and interested in current issues? Then you should enroll in programme X.”). I can’t seem to persuade my bosses of the need to switch to personalized writing though, because – as they put it – it’s important that as many secondary education pupils as possible should recognize themselves in our texts. And ofcourse its true that people have many different reasons to choose a particular education. So, my question is: is it even possible for organizations with so many different target audiences with such divergent interests to find a personal tone of voice in their writing? And if so, how would you tackle this problem? Thanks in advance for your advice, I really appreciate it!

July 13, 2014 at 2:23 pm

Hi Evelyne – that’s an excellent question and can be a tricky problem when people are stuck in old-fashioned writing.

I’d say the first thing to make sure is that your bosses understand the differences between how people read on the web vs how they read an academic paper or a book. This will help them understand the importance of using white space, short sentences, short paragraphs, and simple words.

When you need to appeal to a wider audience, you want to keep your word choice fairly neutral – you can’t add personality by using slang as not everyone will understand it (unless you do for instance specific case studies to appeal to specific groups of students).

Dropbox and Evernote are good examples of companies who appeal to a wide audience, but sound human in their writing. They do this by simplifying their writing, keeping content concise, and focusing strongly on benefits rather than features.

Does this help?

April 16, 2014 at 2:41 am

Henneke, Just now got here, for some unknown reason, and as I read your post, I realized who I would write to, immediately. When I first began blogging, I followed a lovely young woman who inspired me, totally, with her great posts. I wondered how she did everything she did, and why she bothered to visit my site. Then she was attacked on fb, and decided to take a break. My heart was broken, because I saw her as a sort of bloggy mom. although I was old enough to be HER mom. After reading this post, I realize she is who I should write my posts for, sort of in her memory, although she is very much alive and has another new baby to show for her time off. I can constantly visualize her, as I always have, but never did write for/to her. Also, I have noticed on my other site, that when I write advice letters to people whose names I have changed, but whose situations are real, my posts REALLY resonate with people. That’s just what you are talking about, I think…

April 16, 2014 at 11:29 am

Yep, when you write for one person rather than for a crowd of readers, your writing becomes more “real”. Readers will notice it in your writing voice. And they all feel like you’re writing for them personally.

February 5, 2014 at 8:11 pm

This was a nice post, Henneke. I love this quote.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. ~ Elmore Leonard

I think that in all aspects of our digital communications, we need to be more conversational. If there is no personal feel or touch, then what is the point? On that note, I included your post in my roundup of the month’s best SEO, social media, and content marketing. http://www.northcutt.com/blog/2014/02/january-resource-round-up-the-best-of-seo-social-media-and-content-marketing/

February 5, 2014 at 11:38 pm

Yep, conversational writing works in all digital communication. Thank you for stopping by, Ben, and for including my article in your roundup. Much appreciated 🙂

February 4, 2014 at 3:03 pm

In preparation for launching my own blog I’ve start reading posts like these, and I can’t tell you how much it’s helping. Before doing any research into it all I would be writing in a style that might sit somewhere in between this and sleazy sales person, unintentionally of course.

Maybe I should re-consider the copy on my website as well? (see what I did there? :D)

So, thank you again 🙂

February 4, 2014 at 4:18 pm

You’re a quick learner, Sean 🙂

Good luck with launching your blog!

February 1, 2014 at 1:53 pm

Hello Henneke,

I am a first-time reader, and found your guest post from one of my Facebook groups. I really enjoy your writing style, and I can see where some of my blog posts have fallen flat. Thank you for sharing the “how” of storytelling in such an enchanting manner.

February 1, 2014 at 9:06 pm

Hi Holly, Welcome & thank you for taking the time to comment on your first visit. I appreciate it 🙂 Glad to hear you find my blog posts useful!

January 29, 2014 at 3:30 pm

You are a writer–and a darn good one. And I can picture a Kindle children’s book with those super cute pictures. Now you just need a story and title to go with it! 😉

January 29, 2014 at 4:34 pm

Thank you, Penelope. 🙂

Maybe one day I can write and illustrate a children’s book for grown-ups. 😉

February 20, 2019 at 2:52 pm

Oh, yes. Do! Don’t you think a children’s book on how to become a writer would be great? I can imagine if there’d been such a book when I was enjoying writing assignments the MOST in grade school. Wouldn’t you love to cause a child to have courage and begin far earlier than I did? A MUST!!! 😀

January 29, 2014 at 12:34 am

Ok, Henneke. You are going to have to take on the title of “artist” along with writer. Are you up for that? 😉

Now you’ve got me wondering how many questions I have in my posts. I’m gonna go count ’em now. Thanks for germinating and sprouting all these new ideas in my head!

January 29, 2014 at 9:59 am

An artist?!? Not sure I’m quite ready for that yet. I’ve barely got used to the idea of calling myself a writer. 😉

January 23, 2014 at 6:15 am

Dear Henneke,

It is this time I am grateful. Thank you for your generous contributions over time. You have truly enriched my life with a well-toned understanding of writing a Blog.

January 23, 2014 at 11:47 am

You’re welcome, Joel. Thank you for stopping by 🙂

January 21, 2014 at 10:58 am

Thank you Henneke 🙂

January 17, 2014 at 3:49 am

Once again, awesome post, and so completely relevant!

I really like the idea of writing to one reader. As soon as I’m writing to a crowd, I can’t write at all. But I have this ongoing fear that if I write to one reader…my favorite reader…my ideal reader…I’ll connect with such an infinitesimal group of people.

I want to write about writing and marketing. Marketing with soul, you know. Because I feel like anything done with love, with real authenticity, with the soul, is infinitely better. But I’m finding it difficult to take the leap to even do that myself.

Thanks so much, Melissa

January 17, 2014 at 10:43 am

Yes, I so agree with you about writing with the soul. You’ll find that if you write for one reader it becomes much easier to write with soul and personality.

In a way having an ideal reader is just a “trick” to make your writing more engaging. Don’t worry about connecting just with one reader or a few. When you write for one person, it doesn’t mean that only one person will feel you’re talking with them. Many people will feel you’ve written the post especially for them, because many people are struggling with the same problems and challenges as your ideal reader.

Does that help?

January 18, 2014 at 3:42 am

It’s still a little scary, but your words help a lot! Thanks a bunch.

January 16, 2014 at 1:01 am

Hi again, love your drawings. Please note my website is not operating at the moment. I had to remove the files. So at the moment I am reworking everything. Give me a couple of days and I will get back to normal. You see this is the case with novices, mistakes, mistakes and more mistakes. I hope when I have restored the site it will be better in many ways. Also I hope eventually to start a blog that is why I read as much as I can. Your site I enjoy very much. That drawing has again just ‘pinged’ in my mind, so clean cut very striking. I shall have some of my own art, rather conventional, on my site when it is re-published, you might take some time to view. Thanks again for more interesting material, Tom

January 16, 2014 at 4:54 pm

We all make mistakes, Tom. It’s human 🙂

Good luck with reworking your site!

January 15, 2014 at 9:22 pm

Wow, I feel truly honoured to have inspired this post. It’s fantastic and really great advice as always. I just read all the comments you got for this post – looks like I’m not the only one struggling with this particular point. Happy new year, Henneke, and thank you so much for your great blog. xx

January 15, 2014 at 9:55 pm

Thank you so much for all your great comments last year, Kerstin. You inspire me to keep writing. 🙂

Happy new year to you, too!

January 15, 2014 at 6:39 pm

Thanks for the tips. I use “You” a bit more than I should in my posts, as in “You are loved” opposed to “I love you.” Will work on it:)

January 15, 2014 at 9:54 pm

Great! I hope you enjoyed the cake 😉

Thank you for stopping by, Clara.

January 15, 2014 at 5:18 pm

Great post, Henneke! Love how you flipped the idea of writing like you talk and rather to edit your text so it doesn’t sound like writing. Great way to think of it.

January 15, 2014 at 6:17 pm

Thank you, Jonas. This is really how it works for me. I have to edit out the gobbledygook and undulating sentences to make a text more conversational.

Good to see you here! 🙂

January 15, 2014 at 9:47 am

H. firstly, what a great drawing! You should definitely keep going. Thank you also for giving me permission to use but, because, and at the start of sentences. Whilst I’ve let go of other writing formalities, these have been particularly hard to let go. And sometimes it just feels right to start a sentence this way. Really enjoying reading your posts.

January 15, 2014 at 10:15 am

Thank you so much, Caroline. And good to see you’ve given yourself permission to start a sentence with And . You deserve a big slice of cake. 🙂

Just tell that high school teacher to shut up with his old-fashioned advice 🙂

January 15, 2014 at 12:41 pm

Nomnomnom 🙂

January 15, 2014 at 4:13 am

Hi! I just stumbled upon your work and I’m totally hooked!

I’m a marketer in the Philippines. Like you, English is not my native language, but it’s the language I use to reach customers. (Here English is unofficially the language of business.)

You make me want to go back and improve everything I’ve done in the past. Now I know how to do it. Thank you!

January 15, 2014 at 10:12 am

Welcome, Rhea. It’s so nice to have people from across the world joining the conversation here. I hope you took a big slice of the cake 😉

January 14, 2014 at 9:59 pm

Henneke, I love your illustration . Congratulations! I’m proud of you

January 14, 2014 at 10:16 pm

Thank you, Louie. As one of my most loyal readers you deserve a real slice of cake some time!

January 14, 2014 at 9:58 pm

As part of my New Year’s plan to get a handle on my e-mail in-box I have unsubscribed from most of the e-mail lists I have been on. But, I love receiving your e-mails because I feel exactly the way you describe in your post when I see yours come in. Thanks for your clear, helpful, engaging, and very personalized writing!

January 14, 2014 at 10:14 pm

I feel honored that you’re still allowing my emails in your inbox. Thank you. I’ll do my best to keep rewarding you with a slice of cake each week 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 8:57 pm

Another great post. I’m definitely guilty of not asking enough questions and not focusing enough on the reader.

– Steve

P.S. The cartoon was cute as well

It’s easy to forget the reader – you can’t see him yawning, glancing at his cellphone, or fidgeting in his seat as a sign that you’re rambling on too much. A face-to-face conversation is much easier.

Thank you for stopping by! 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 7:18 pm

Hi Henneke, Excellent article. You do write very conversationally, so you are walking the walk.

I cringe everytime I see an exclamation mark because I feel as if I’m being “screamed at.” And besides, it takes away from prudent use of it!!!! So many !!!! in our lives, it feels like so much noise!

I love the picture of Henrietta & Arthur!!!! (Those are sincere) Mary

January 14, 2014 at 7:41 pm

I once wrote that using more than one exclamation mark – in an email or blog post – is a crime against enchantment. I still believe this is true.

And yes, I do my best to walk the walk. Thank you so much, Mary 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 4:14 pm

Really helpful. Thank you! Learned a lot this week. And I’m particularly motivated as I did a survey of respondents last week and when asked what I could improve, a few of them said my grammar! I couldn’t agree more.

Interesting to read your comment about your native Dutch coming out – my New Zealand comes out too. I try and catch it, because people don’t understand me when I use words like “niggle” (irritate), “puke” (throw up) or “pash (kiss),” but they still occasionally slip through.

This language business is awfully fun. And I love reading your emails each week. Thanks again, Lisa (PS: Have you read “On Writing” by Stephen King? Am reading at the moment, again. Very inspiring.)

January 14, 2014 at 5:21 pm

Yes, language is fun. I sometimes use British words without realizing they’re specific to British-English and others might not get them.

I like the word “niggle” – it’s also used over here. I’m surprised people don’t know the word “puke” – I see it used quite a lot in blog posts. “Pash” sounds nice, but is new to me 🙂

Yes, “On Writing” is one of my faves, too. Have you read “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott? That’s inspirational, too.

Good to see you again!

January 14, 2014 at 5:58 pm

Ooh, thanks, I haven’t read that one. Will check it out.

And, yeah I was surprised about those words too. (“Pash” is what a NZ young person might call kissing, more than just a peck. A fun word to use!) Have a great week:)

January 14, 2014 at 3:40 pm

Henneke, I see that asking questions is so important, and I enjoy “talking” to you, answering the questions in your text. I will do it in our next post, thanks for pointing out.

January 14, 2014 at 4:08 pm

Always good to have you around for tea and cake 😉

January 14, 2014 at 3:35 pm

Love this article Henneke! Your drawing is amazing as well. I look forward to seeing more of them 🙂 Thank you so much for sharing your tools and knowledge. I especially found the use of question marks very helpful. Conversational copy is something that *seems* like it should be so easy…but it can be hard to retrain ourselves and unlearn what we’ve learned in school. But, we must adapt, right? 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 3:42 pm

Yes, I think that’s the mistake many people make – conversational copy *seems* easy because it’s so easy to read. But the truth is that it’s damn hard work to eradicate gobbledygook and to make each sentence flow naturally.

Thank you for stopping by, Kristy. I appreciate it! 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 3:32 pm

Hi, Henneke, You write the best emails with great headlines that always make me want to read your posts.

Why don’t you teach a headline class?? Blog post writing class??

I would take it and I’m sure some of your other readers would also! Sue

Hi Sue, thank you so much. Stay tuned – I’m developing a blog writing e-course.

I’m hoping to have an early bird list live before the end of February. 🙂

PS Isn’t it wonderful how two question marks (“??”) indicate a pleasant amount of impatience?

January 14, 2014 at 3:16 pm

I love the idea of adding questions in a blog post to engage the reader even more. Do you think this would apply to product descriptions as well?

January 14, 2014 at 3:17 pm

P.S. Love the illustration!

January 14, 2014 at 3:24 pm

Thank you 🙂

Good to see your (new?) avatar!

January 14, 2014 at 3:23 pm

That’s a good question! You made me think … Most product descriptions might be too short to include questions. Questions might sound unnatural as you don’t have enough time to really start a conversation. But if you write longer product descriptions it can work.

January 14, 2014 at 3:00 pm

A great post. Thank you so much. Loved the *3* essential tools you gave me. I could even ‘hear’ some dialect in your post, eh? Congratulations Henneke!

January 14, 2014 at 3:05 pm

You might be hearing my Dutch accent 😉

I used to be dead-nervous about using “Dutchisms” (phrases inspired by Dutch – my native language) in my blog posts, but I’ve now decided that’s part of my charm.

Thank you, John.

January 14, 2014 at 2:22 pm

H. Passive sentences are some of my challenges. How do you feel about checking your writing via http://www.read-able.com ? Keeps me on my finger tips. sQs Your advocate in Delray Beach FL

January 14, 2014 at 2:36 pm

I haven’t used this particular tool, but I have used the readability stats that Microsoft Word shows (if you tick the right box and do a spelling check). I’ve been a bit sloppier with this recently, but a year ago I would religiously check:

(a) the average number of words per sentence – I would go back to chop up long sentences and tighten my text when my average was over 14 words per sentence

(b) passive sentences – even if I had only 1% of passive sentences, I would try rephrasing the passive sentence. Occasionally I’d be happy to leave a passive sentence.

February 1, 2014 at 1:48 pm

Looks for the word “are” – it is not active. It is sitting on the couch. So are all verbs of “being.” If you catch one, try to change it. Example: “Passive sentences are some of my challenges” is more powerful as, “Passive sentences challenge me.” Whenever you can find the verb form of a noun, use it and remove “is” or “are.” Happy writing!

January 14, 2014 at 12:41 pm

‘Sleazy salesmen use exclamation marks. Good conversationalists use question marks.’ >> That is a world famous quote by Henneke D, did you know that?

January 14, 2014 at 1:20 pm

Somehow it feels like it has taken me a year to write these two sentences. They just clicked into place yesterday. To me they express the essence of good writing.

January 14, 2014 at 1:34 pm

Of effective writing, for sure!

January 14, 2014 at 12:31 pm

Henrietta looks very happy today! :))) Just a question: when you talk about “your favourite reader” why is it a “she”? Is it like boats, planes… and always feminine? Bit confused.

January 14, 2014 at 1:14 pm

I’m not sure who’s happier – Henrietta herself or her dog Arthur? 😉

Your reader can be a “she” or a “he”. It depends on who you like working with most.

January 14, 2014 at 12:12 pm

Truth is… I’m thinking about unsunbscribing from a blog for feeling that they care not for their readers.

The writing is good, so are the ideas — but their emails are nothing but links to the day’s post (ok, not much harm in that), while I see no answers on their blog comments, nor any real interaction on their FB page.

It’s only talk, talk, talk, or rather write-and-post-it, and I even think that even their blog commenters have tailed away lately.

January 14, 2014 at 1:10 pm

Yes, you make an excellent point. Readers can sense it immediately when writers don’t care and when they’re insincere.

January 14, 2014 at 11:59 am

You did it. I’m really waiting for the next slice of your home-made cake. 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 1:03 pm

Thank you, Paul 🙂

Don’t tell anyone, but the truth is that in real life I’m not so good at baking cakes – I prefer cooking a delicious meal!

January 14, 2014 at 11:56 am

Thanks Henneke, another keeper of a blog post. makes a lot of sense. Time for me to head off to the local cafe and write up the first draft of my next newsletter I think… Oh, and really like your illustrations, VERY cute doggie!

January 14, 2014 at 1:00 pm

Yes, that’s a good idea. I’m sure writing in a local cafe can make your content livelier, too!

Thank you for stopping by, Lynne 🙂

January 14, 2014 at 11:31 am

Can’t agree more! This is really good advice. And I love your illustration, Henneke!

January 14, 2014 at 12:56 pm

Thank you, Lucy. The book Leonardo’s Swans sounds interesting!

January 14, 2014 at 10:21 pm

Thank you for the link to the photos, Henneke. I’m feeling super inspired now! Have to do something like this with my paintings.

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Writing Dialogue [20 Best Examples + Formatting Guide]

Have you ever found yourself cringing at clunky dialogue while reading a book or watching a movie? I know I have.

It’s like nails on a chalkboard, completely ruining the experience. But on the flip side, well-written dialogue can transform a story. It’s the magic that makes characters leap off the page, immersing us in their world.

As a writer, I’m fascinated by the mechanics of great dialogue.

So here are 20 of the best examples of writing dialogue that brings your story to life.

Example 1: Dialogue that Reveals Character

Table of Contents

One of the most powerful functions of dialogue is to shed light on your characters’ personalities.

The way they speak – their word choice, tone, even their hesitations – can tell us so much about who they are. Check out this example:

“Look, I ain’t gonna sugarcoat this,” the detective growled, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the chair. “You were spotted leaving the scene, and the murder weapon’s got your prints all over it.”

Without any lengthy description, we get a sense of this detective as a no-nonsense, direct type of guy.

Example 2: Dialogue that Builds Tension

Dialogue can become this amazing tool to ratchet up the tension in a scene.

Short, clipped exchanges and carefully placed silences can leave the reader on the edge of their seat.

Here’s how it might play out:

“Do you hear that?” Sarah whispered. “Hear what?” A scratching noise echoed from the attic. Sarah’s eyes widened. “It’s coming back.”

The suspense is killing me just writing that!

Example 3: Dialogue that Drives the Plot

Conversations aren’t just about characters sitting around and chatting.

Great dialogue should actively push the story forward. It can set up a conflict, reveal key information, or change the course of events.

Take a look at this:

“I’ve made my decision,” the king declared, the crown heavy on his brow. “We go to war.”

A single line, and the whole trajectory of the story shifts.

Formatting Tips: The Basics

Now, before we get carried away, let’s cover some essential dialogue formatting rules.

Think of these as the grammar of a good conversation.

• Quotation Marks:  Yep, those little squiggles are your best friend. They signal to the reader: “Hey! Someone’s talking!”
• New Speaker, New Paragraph:  Whenever a different character starts talking, give them a new paragraph. It’s all about keeping things easy to follow.
• Dialogue Tags:  These are the little phrases like “he said” or “she replied.” Use them, but try not to overuse them. A well-placed action beat can often do a better job of showing who’s speaking.

Example 4: Dialogue that Creates Humor

Dialogue can be ridiculously funny when done well.

The key? Snappy exchanges, playful misunderstandings, and just a dash of absurdity. Consider this:

“I saw the weirdest thing at the grocery store today,” Tom said, “A woman arguing with a head of lettuce.” “Was she winning?” Lily asked, a grin playing on her lips.

You can almost hear the deadpan delivery, can’t you?

Example 5: Dialogue that Shows Relationships

The way characters speak to each other says a ton about the dynamics between them.

Is there warmth, hostility, an underlying power struggle? Dialogue can paint a crystal-clear picture. Imagine this exchange:

“You didn’t do the dishes again?” Sarah sighed, hands planted on her hips. “Aw, c’mon babe. I was busy,” Mike whined, avoiding her gaze.

We instantly sense the long-suffering tone from Sarah and the playful guilt from Mike.

Example 6: Dialogue with Subtext

The most interesting dialogue often has layers. What the characters say might not be exactly what they mean.

This is where subtext comes in – the unspoken thoughts and feelings bubbling beneath the surface.

Take this snippet:

“It’s a nice ring,” Emily said, her voice flat. “You don’t like it?” Mark’s brow furrowed. Emily shrugged. “It’s fine.”

Is Emily truly indifferent? Or is she masking disappointment, perhaps a sense of something not being quite right? Subtext makes us read between the lines.

Formatting Tips: Getting Fancy

Now, let’s spice things up with a few more advanced formatting tricks:

• Ellipses (…):  These little dots are perfect for showing a character trailing off, hesitating, or searching for words. Example: “I…I don’t know what to say.”
• Em Dashes (—):  These guys can interrupt a thought or indicate a sudden change in direction. Example: “I was going to apologize, but then — well, you’re still being a jerk.”
• Internal Dialogue:  Instead of quotation marks, sometimes you’ll want to italicize a character’s inner thoughts. Example:  Why did I say that? I’m such an idiot.

Cautionary Note

It’s important to remember: dialogue shouldn’t feel like an interrogation. Avoid rigid “question-answer, question-answer” patterns. Real conversations flow and meander naturally.

Example 7: Dialogue with Dialects and Accents

Regional dialects and accents can bring so much flavor to your characters, but it’s a delicate balance.

You want to add authenticity without it becoming a caricature or making it hard to understand.

Here’s a subtle example:

“Well, I’ll be darned,” drawled the farmer, squinting at the sky. “Looks like a storm’s brewin’.”

Notice how just a few word choices and a slight change in pronunciation hint at the speaker’s background.

Example 8: Dialogue in Groups

Writing conversations with more than two people can get chaotic fast. The key is clarity.

Here are a few tips:

• Strong Dialogue Tags:  Sometimes, you need to be more specific than just “he said” or “she said”. Example: “Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed Sarah.
• Action Beats:  Break up chunks of dialogue with actions that show who’s speaking. Example: Tom slammed his fist on the table. “I won’t stand for this!”

Example 9: Dialogue Over the Phone (or Other Technology)

Conversations where characters aren’t physically together pose unique challenges.

You can’t rely on body language cues. Instead, focus on conveying tone and potential misunderstandings.

For instance:

“Hello?” Sarah’s voice crackled through the phone. A long pause. “Sarah, is that you?” “Mom? Why are you whispering?”

Instantly there’s a sense of distance and something not being quite right.

Example 10: Inner Monologue with a Twist

We often think of internal dialogue as a single character reflecting, but sometimes our inner voices can argue.

This can be a powerful way to showcase internal conflict.

Here’s how it might look:

You should just tell him how you feel, one voice chimed. Are you crazy? the other shrieked back. He’ll never feel the same way .

This creates a vivid picture of a character torn between opposing desires.

Example 11: Dialogue With a Manipulative Character

Manipulative characters often use language as a weapon.

They might use guilt trips, flattery, or veiled threats to get what they want.

Consider this:

“After everything I’ve done for you…” The old woman sighed, a flicker of disappointment in her eyes. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t expect gratitude.”

Notice how she doesn’t directly ask for anything, instead hinting at a debt, leaving the listener feeling uneasy and obligated.

Example 12: Dialogue Across Time Periods

If you’re writing historical fiction or anything with time travel elements, you’ll need to capture the distinct speech patterns of different eras.

Imagine this exchange:

“Gadzooks! What manner of contraption is this?” The Victorian gentleman exclaimed, staring in bewilderment at the smartphone. “It’s a phone,” the teenager replied, barely suppressing a laugh. “Let me show you.”

This little snippet highlights the potential for both humor and linguistic challenges when worlds collide.

Formatting Tip: Dialogue Without Tags

Sometimes, for a rapid-fire or dreamlike effect, you might want to ditch the “he said” or “she asked” altogether.

It’s a bold move, but it can be effective if done sparingly.

Check this out:

“Where are you going?” “Away.” “When will you be back?” “I don’t know.” “Please don’t leave me.”

This creates a sense of urgency, the raw exchange forcing us to focus solely on the words themselves.

Example 13: Dialogue that Shows Transformation

A great way to showcase how a character develops is through shifts in how they speak.

Maybe they become bolder, quieter, or their vocabulary changes.

Let’s see an example:

Scene 1: “I-I don’t know,” Emily whimpered, cowering in the corner. Scene 2 (Later in the story): “That’s it. I’m not taking this anymore!” Emily declared, her chin held high.

The dialogue itself reflects her transformation from victim to someone ready to stand up for herself.

Example 14: Dialogue that’s Just Plain Weird

It’s okay to get strange sometimes.

Absurdist humor or unsettling conversations can add a unique flavor to your story. Just be sure it fits the overall tone.

“Do you believe in cucumbers?” the man asked, his eyes wide and unblinking. “Excuse me?” “Cucumbers, my dear. Agents of the underground vegetable kingdom.”

This immediately creates a sense of oddness and perhaps a touch of unease. Is this guy crazy, or is there something more going on?

Example 15: Dialogue with a Purpose

Remember, good dialogue isn’t just about being entertaining.

It should move your story along. Here are some functions dialogue can serve:

• Providing Exposition:  Sometimes, you need to inform the reader of backstory or world-building details. Trickle information through natural conversation rather than an information dump.
• Foreshadowing:  Subtle hints within a conversation can foreshadow future events or create a sense of unease for the reader.
• Revealing a Twist:  A single line of dialogue can completely flip the script and reframe everything that came before.

Example 16: Dialogue with Non-Verbal Elements

So much of communication happens beyond just words.

Sighs, laughs, and gestures can add richness to dialogue on the page.

“I’m fine,” she said, crossing her arms and looking away.

Notice how the body language contradicts her words, hinting at inner turmoil.

Example 17: Silence as Dialogue

Sometimes, what isn’t said is the most powerful thing of all.

A pregnant pause or a character refusing to speak can convey volumes.

Imagine this:

“So, will you help me or not?” Tom pleaded. Sarah stared at him, her lips a thin line. Finally, she turned and walked away.

The lack of a verbal response speaks louder than any words could.

Example 18: Dialogue With Humorous Effect

A well-timed O.S. voice can deliver a funny remark or punchline, undercutting the seriousness of a scene or taking a moment in an unexpected comedic direction.

INT. CLASSROOM – DAY The teacher drones on about the causes of the American Revolution, his voice as dull as the worn textbook in front of him. KEVIN tries to stifle his yawns, failing miserably. STUDENT (O.S.) Is he ever going to stop talking? My brain just turned to mush. Snickers ripple through the class. The teacher pauses, a look of annoyance flickering across his face. Kevin shoots a desperate look towards the source of the O.S. voice.

• Timing is everything. The best comedic O.S. lines act as a witty reaction to something else happening in a scene. The student’s comment comes right as Kevin’s boredom peaks.
• Subverting expectations is funny. The audience expects the scene to continue with a stern reprimand for speaking out of turn, but the script doesn’t give us that. This leaves room for further humor.
• Consider the tone of the voice – sarcastic, matter-of-fact, or outright whiny? This adds to the comedic effect.

Example 19: Dialogue With Unexpected Reveals

Think of this as a surprise twist using O.S. dialogue.

The audience (and maybe even some characters) are led to believe one thing, only for an O.S. voice to reveal something completely unexpected, shifting the scene’s dynamic.

INT. POLICE INTERROGATION ROOM – NIGHTDETECTIVE HARRIS paces in front of a nervous SUSPECT. Photos of the crime scene are scattered on the table. HARRIS Don’t lie to me! We’ve got witnesses who saw you at the scene. SUSPECT I – I swear, I had nothing to do with it! I was… I was with my girlfriend. Harris leans in, a triumphant glint in her eyes. She claps her hands sharply, startling the suspect. WOMAN (O.S.) That’s a lie! He was nowhere near me last night! The suspect whips around. His face pales as we hear the sound of the interrogation room door swinging open…

• The power lies in the build-up. The initial dialogue and the characters’ reactions should lead the audience to believe one outcome, making the O.S. interruption all the more impactful.
• Consider who speaks the O.S. line. Is it someone the audience recognizes, or a totally new character whose identity becomes a new mystery?
• Play with the proximity of the voice. Is it right outside the room, adding to the dramatic reveal as the door opens, or is it more distant – perhaps a voice over an intercom – for an even more unsettling effect?

Example 20: Dialogue With a “Haunted” Feeling

Explanation: O.S. can be used to create an eerie or unsettling atmosphere, particularly in horror or psychological thrillers. This could be unexplained voices, creepy whispers, or sounds that hint at a supernatural (or simply unnerving) presence.

INT. OLD MANSION – NIGHTSARAH explores the abandoned mansion, flashlight cutting through the thick dust. Cobwebs cling to every surface. A faint WHISPER drifts through the air, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Sarah freezes. VOICE (O.S.) Get out… leave this place… Sarah’s breath catches in her throat. She hesitantly follows the direction of the voice, her flashlight beam trembling.

• Less is more. The vaguer and more inexplicable the O.S. voice, the more chilling it becomes.
• Layer sounds for a full creepy effect. Combine whispers with unexpected bangs, creaks, or the faint sound of footsteps following behind Sarah.
• Play with audience expectations. If the script initially leads the audience to think the house is merely abandoned, the O.S. voices become that much more terrifying.

Here is a good video about writing dialogue:

Additional Dialogue Tips & Tricks

• Read Your Dialogue Aloud:  This is the best way to catch awkward phrasing or unnatural rhythms. Our ears often pick up on what our eyes might miss.
• Less is More:  Don’t feel the need to have every single interaction be profound. Sometimes a simple “Hey” or “Thanks” can do the job just fine.
• Eavesdrop:  Paying attention to real-life conversations is fantastic research. Note the pauses, the filler words, the way people interrupt each other.

Final Thoughts: Writing Dialogue

Phew! We did it!

Does that feel like a solid collection of dialogue examples? We haven’t covered absolutely every scenario, but I hope these illustrate the vast potential within dialogue to bring your stories to life.

Read This Next:

• How To Use Action Tags in Dialogue: Ultimate Guide
• How Do Writers Fill a Natural Pause in Dialogue? [7 Crazy Effective Ways]
• Can You Start a Novel with Dialogue?
• How To Write A Southern Accent (17 Tips + Examples)
• How to Write a French Accent (13 Best Tips with Examples)

How to Write an Essay in Conversation Style

How to Determine the Tone of an Essay

Conversational essays are intended to engage the reader and draw them in more than a more formal essay would. The stylistic choices that writers use ultimately determine the level of formality of an essay. Narrative essays tend to be more conversational in style because they generally include personal anecdotes and are usually written in first person point of view, naturally giving them a more conversational tone.

Word Choice

An author’s choice of words greatly affects an essay’s style. It helps to use simple words when creating a conversational style, as if you are speaking directly to the reader. Colloquial phrases almost never appear in a formal essay, but they can be used to great effect to create a conversational tone in a narrative essay. For example, if you are writing about what makes a great teacher and you wanted to say that long lectures are boring, in a conversational essay you can start out using a colloquialism. For example, "Classes where the teacher drones on forever aren't much fun, and students lose interest quickly." In a formal essay, a similar sentiment might read, "Teachers who only lecture aren't as effective as teachers who provide engaging activities for the students."

Point of View

Using a first person point of view is another way to create a conversational tone in an essay, especially narrative essays, because it gives the tone of the essay a more relaxed and conversational feel. For example, a first person account of your favorite teacher will give an essay a more conversational feel than if you are writing a more distanced third person account of teachers in general. A conversational essay feels more immediate and personal, and a first person point of view helps provide that sense of immediacy. Readers will feel that you are speaking directly to them instead of to the audience at large.

Rhetorical Questions

Asking readers rhetorical questions often engages them by creating a “dialogue” in the minds of the readers. As they read and mentally respond to the questions you pose, they become part of a conversation with you, the author of the essay. This mental engagement helps create a more conversational style.

Inserting humor into an essay also lightens the formality of the rigid essay structure. Whether it’s a humorous introduction or a sprinkling of witty but relevant remarks throughout the essay, using humor creates a more conversational tone in an essay. Humor shortens the emotional distance between people and encourages dialogue. This makes an essay more conversational because readers feel like they are a part of the writing and not just spectators. But, be careful not to overdo the humor as too much or too overt humor can take your essay from conversational to frivolous and silly.

Related Articles

List of Voice Types in Literature

Speech Vs. Essay

Problems That Students Encounter With Essay Writing

How to Write a Humor Essay

How to Write a Speculative Essay

What Are the Differences Between Formal & Informal Speech?

How to Identify Diction

Five Types of Genres in Writing

• Writers Digest: Crafting a First-Person Essay
• Writing Commons: Using First Person in an Academic Essay: When is It Okay?

Stacy Alleyne is a certified English teacher with a BA in English and graduate work in English, education, journalism and law. She has written numerous articles and her own dining column for the "Gazette."

Introduction to College Writing

Essays as conversation.

Think of an essay as participating in a conversation, in which you offer your ideas and provide details to explain those ideas to others. Writers do not make their claims in an enormous blank room where no one else is and nothing else has ever happened. Writers make their claims in the real world where people with other opinions, values, beliefs, and experiences live. To make a claim is to enter into a conversation with these people. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke once famously described this as a parlor or a party to which you have come late to find out that people are already in heated discussions about a topic. Everyone has been in these kinds of arguments.

For example, you arrive somewhere to meet two friends and discover that they are discussing where to go to dinner or what movie to see. Each friend presents his or her argument, setting out evidence for why this restaurant or movie is a good choice, and each friend pokes holes in the other person’s argument, pointing out why you would not enjoy that restaurant or movie. You are expected to take a role in this discussion. Maybe you take a stand with one friend over the other or maybe you try to reach a compromise and propose a third restaurant or movie that everyone could accept. This can lead to even further discussion.

This discussion between three friends is somewhat like Burke’s idea of the parlor but there are differences. Eventually the conversation between the three friends will reach an end: they will go to dinner or a movie, perhaps, or they will all go home. Everyone entered into the conversation, made his or her claims, responded to other people, and went on with his or her life. their lives. Burke, however, was talking about the conversations and arguments that take place in the larger culture and the world as a whole. Those are the larger conversations you’ll participate in as you deal with issues in psychology, business management, literature, history…whatever your specific academic focus is in whatever college course you are taking at the moment. Essay writing is one way of participating in that conversation.

Remember that college essay assignments often expect you to delve deeply into an issue, analyzing its various sides in order to come to your own conclusions, based on your observations, insights, and appropriate research.  As you develop your own conclusions, you’ll have interesting ideas to offer in conversation.

Although the following video references graduate-level students, the same concepts hold true for undergraduate college writing, in which you’ll start learning how to join a conversation.

• Essays as Conversation. Revision and adaptation of the page Writing Commons: Michael Charlton's Understanding How Conversations Change Over Time at https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=6695. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Provided by : Empire State College, SUNY OER Services. Project : College Writing. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• Writing Commons: Michael Charlton's Understanding How Conversations Change Over Time. Authored by : Michael Charlton. Provided by : Saylor Academy. Located at : https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=6695 . Project : ENGL001: English Composition I. License : Other . License Terms : Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
• image of three friends in conversation. Authored by : rawpixel. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/en/adult-group-meeting-man-table-3365364/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• video An introduction to academic writing and research. Provided by : University of Roehampton. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kItASt4DjXA . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

Conversational Analysis: Exploring Social Interactions

Introduction

Conversation analysis: an overview, what are the basic principles of conversational analysis, conversation analysis example, how is conversation analysis carried out, challenges of conversation analysis.

From pauses to thinking words, from changes in volume to emphasis on words, conversation analysis looks at all the different ways meaning is embedded and understood in social interaction. In linguistics, conversation analysis plays a role in discourse analysis by focusing less on what people say and more on how they say it.

That said, there are numerous challenges and complexities relating to how people speak, how speech is understood, and how conversation shapes meaning, social relationships, and cultures. Collecting data to document and analyze the complexity of spoken interactions, as a result, is an equally daunting task, requiring a deep consideration of this analytical approach in detail.

In this article, we will look at conversation analysis, techniques used to conduct conversation analysis effectively, and challenges that researchers face when analyzing social interaction.

Conversation analysis examines concepts of speech acts that are non-verbal in nature such as speaking speed, intonation, word stress, and length of pauses. In contrast, discourse analysis focuses on understanding human communication through analyzing words, their meaning, the intentions behind them, and the underlying assumptions that inform them. Conversation analysis instead focuses on the non-verbal cues in social interactions.

What is the function of conversational analysis?

Conversation analysis theory acknowledges the importance of non-verbal cues present in interaction. Without these cues, interaction looks and sounds very different and perhaps unnatural.

For example, when someone answers a question, how confident are they in their answer? We can infer their level of confidence in the way they speak. Maybe they pause in between words because they are mentally searching for the right words. Perhaps they emphasize certain words in their answer because they are speaking from a place of authority and expertise.

The goal of conversation analysis is to document the ways that speakers interact with each other. The challenge is that the written form used in research papers and presentations does not lend itself to showing non-verbal information embedded in communication. We as research writers use prose and bulleted lists and rely on words to convey meaning.

As a result, it's incumbent on researchers employing conversation analysis to present their research with a strong conversation analysis essay or presentation that visualizes interaction. Searches for communication studies often produce research that provides various conversation analysis examples that make use of notations to mark the various non-verbal cues accompanying interaction.

Details captured in conversation analysis

Undertaking conversation analysis means analyzing the various features and developments of interaction and presenting them in an empirical manner that leads to theoretical development. While many other research inquiries that look at data from interviews and focus group discussions primarily examine the meaning of words and the co-construction of knowledge, conversation analysis acknowledges the importance of the accompanying features of interaction in influencing that meaning.

Some details captured in conversation analysis include, but are not limited to, the following:

• turn-taking
• interruptions
• thinking words
• word stress
• body language

Think about how each of these details, in isolation or in conjunction with each other, can make an interaction look and sound fundamentally different than an interaction without these details. Their contribution to the nuances of interaction justify the utility of conversation analysis among researchers in linguistics.

Distinguishing conversation analysis from discourse analysis

You can think of conversation analysis and discourse analysis either as complementary approaches or as one being a subset of the other. Either way, they have distinct approaches and objectives that are worth exploring in discrete detail.

Discourse analysis investigates the use of language in all aspects, from the meaning that is conveyed to the way that it is conveyed and why. Understanding discourse means acknowledging the larger context around language and communication and how that context informs meaning, cultures, and social relations.

Another approach is critical discourse analysis, which examines the use of language as an exercise of power. How politicians, business executives, and other people in power communicate messages is an important area of study that captures how ideas are shaped to reaffirm the power of institutions.

On the surface, it may not seem that there is significant overlap between conversation analysis and these other analytical approaches. However, the main thing in common between conversation analysis and discourse analysis is the assumption that the meaning of words is complemented by a whole host of other contextual cues, cultural assumptions, and situational considerations.

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Conversation analysis is more of a broad analytical approach rather than a strict methodology that warrants definition. However, there are a number of guiding principles that researchers should acknowledge when conducting conversation analysis:

• Empirical focus . There is an understanding among conversation analysis researchers that, given the dynamics of naturally occurring spoken interactions, spoken discourse can be captured and analyzed in a systematic manner. An empirical focus to conversation analysis can capture data and structure it in a way that allows researchers to identify recurring patterns from the interactional data.
• Context sensitivity . At the same time, researchers also acknowledge that the universal rules for interaction are all but elusive as interactions are informed by cultures, contexts, and individual differences. How speakers interact with each other in one culture is bound to differ from speakers in other cultures, so it is incumbent on researchers to place interactions in their situated contexts to provide sufficient definition to the theoretical developments they propose.
• Order in interaction . More often that not, people in interaction respond to each other in a process called turn-taking. This is easy to observe in a conversation involving two people, but how does this play out in a situation involving three or more speakers? As a result, researchers also employ conversation analysis to understand power dynamics between speakers, particularly those of different statuses or positions, or those with particular relationships.
• Indexicality . Research employing conversation analysis often examines the semiotic systems - or the ways in which people communicate and understand meaning - that guide interaction. A major component of semiotics is indexicality, or the concept where meaning is tied to "signs" in interaction such as gestures, pronouns, and accents. Capturing this indexicality thus requires situating interactions in sufficient context at the individual and macro levels.
• Data-driven analysis . Conversation analysis is primarily an inductive approach to understanding interactional data. While some research inquiries in conversation analysis may involve hypothesis testing or experimental study that can be deductive in nature, theoretical developments in conversation analysis typically arise from the data itself. This is an important feature of this analytical approach, especially when inductively analyzing culture and language.

The concept of Phonetics of Talk in Interaction provides a useful example where conversation analysis can prove relevant. Think about how mothers talk to their babies, and how this talk might be different among adults, or even between adults and children who are able to speak.

At least in Western contexts, mothers tend to repeat the nonsensical utterances their babies might make. They may also exaggerate their pronunciation of words or speak more slowly. Why they do this is fundamental to understanding parenting, making the empirical collection of data that represents these phenomena important to research about parenting and communication.

Other conversation analysis examples can look at how intonation and prosody inform communication. Consider the question "What did you do last night?" A speaker can emphasize any word in that question and the nuance might change accordingly. If they emphasize "what" or "night," the assumptions we can make about the speaker regarding what they are interested in and what they assume about who they are talking to are bound to change.

Conversation analysis can also look at how communication features like turn-taking, prosody, non-verbal gestures, and facial expressions might change across forms of interaction. Indeed, the way that people take turns in an online meeting can look fundamentally different from the turn-taking in face-to-face communication, prompting researchers to explore how online communication shapes interaction in different ways.

Conversation analysis typically has an established process that, in many ways, mirrors the process for other forms of qualitative research . That said, researchers should keep some additional considerations in mind while conducting conversation analysis.

• Data collection . Observations , interviews , and focus group discussions typically involve data collection by the use of an audio recorder. In addition, you may want to keep track of non-verbal utterances and other developments of note by using a video recorder or taking notes during data collection . Your data collection may also focus on different specific types of interaction, such as speeches, discussions, and dialogues.
• Conversation analysis transcription . Transcription is the process of turning raw audio or video into written text representing the words uttered in an interaction. When employing conversation analysis, you will likely want to consider transcribing as much detail as possible to capture spoken interaction subtleties. Thinking words, repetitions, errors in grammar and sentence structure, and other features of interaction that may not be linguistically accurate should all be included for the purpose of analysis. You may also include notations to indicate where relevant non-verbal cues occurred.
• Reflections on data collection . Reflections and realizations may come to you during the course of data collection which can inform your analysis. Conversation analysis notes and memos can be a useful component of the research process as they can point to important features of communication that warrant analysis or potentially novel theoretical developments regarding interaction.
• Notation of transcripts . A conversation analysis looks to examine spoken interactions closely by presenting utterances in extensive detail. However, when research papers and presentations rely on the written form to convey their findings, it's important to have a system in place for transcribing and marking up interaction data. The Jeffersonian transcription system is a form of notation commonly used in conversation analysis research to mark up details like turn-taking, pauses, and prosody. Other systems such as systemic functional linguistics transcription and phonetic transcription also exist, so you can choose the most appropriate approach for the research question you are exploring.

Developing expertise in conversation analysis requires an approach to qualitative data that differs from other methods such as thematic analysis and content analysis . A good deal of data organization is necessary to provide the structure that allows for an analysis of interactions that captures conversation analysis concepts in a rigorous fashion.

There are a number of methodological and logistical concerns to keep in mind when conducting conversation analysis.

• Equipment for data collection . The tasks of collecting conversational data can prove challenging when they rely on capturing as much granular detail as possible to facilitate writing realistic dialogue in research papers and presentations. A standard audio recorder might accomplish most tasks in conversation analysis, but if your research question relies on specific details in interaction such as intonation and word stress, more sensitive audio or video recording equipment might be necessary.
• Transcription . Transcribing natural spoken interactions remains an inherently subjective process despite the growing body of studies that employ conversation analysis. The manner in which you transcribe utterances should aim to be consistent and comprehensive in capturing as much detail as possible. Some people use more thinking words and sounds than others, while others may repeat words or stutter while speaking.
• Notation . Marking up research transcripts in a consistent and rigorous manner is yet another subjective component of conversation analysis. How do you measure pauses between words? What constitutes a sufficient rise or fall in intonation to warrant notation? Which syllables in a word does the speaker emphasize? Simply using a standard, established notation is not enough; it's far more important to apply it consistently in a way that your research audience can understand.
• Research and writing process . When employing conversation analysis, essay writing becomes a formidable task when it comes to persuading the research audience. A comprehensive conversation analysis essay requires an empirical approach to presenting findings in a manner that is easy for your research audience to understand. If you are presenting examples of your conversation analysis in written form, consider using a common notation that adheres to consistent standards. In addition, be sure to explain your data and analysis thoroughly enough to immerse your audience in the context of your data and the theoretical developments it illustrates.

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Last updated on Sep 21, 2023

How to Write Fabulous Dialogue [9 Tips + Examples]

This post is written by author, editor, and bestselling ghostwriter Tom Bromley. He is the  instructor of Reedsy's 101-day course,  How to Write a Novel .

Good dialogue isn’t about quippy lines and dramatic pauses.

Good dialogue is about propelling the story forward, pulling the reader along, and fleshing out characters and their dynamics in front of readers. Well-written dialogue can take your story to a new level — you just have to unlock it.

In this article, I’ll break down the major steps of writing great dialogue, and provide exercises for you to practice your own dialogue on.

Here's how to write great dialogue in 9 steps:

1. Use quotation marks to signal speech

2. pace dialogue lines by three , 3. use action beats , 4. use ‘said’ as a dialogue tag  , 5. write scene-based dialogue, 6. model any talk on real life , 7. differentiate character voices, 8. "show, don't tell" information in conversation , 9. delete superfluous words, which dialogue tag are you.

Find out in just a minute.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out.”

Similarly, I could say that good dialogue in a novel is a real conversation without all the fluff — and with quotation marks. 

Imagine, for instance, if every scene with dialogue in your novel started out with:

'Hey, buddy! How are you doing?"

“Great! How are you?""

'Great! Long time no see! Parking was a nightmare, wasn’t it?"

Firstly, from a technical perspective, the quotation marks are inconsistent and incorrectly formatted. To learn about the mechanics of your dialogue and how to format it, we also wrote this full post on the topic that I recommend reading.

Secondly, from a novel perspective, such lines don’t add anything to the story. And finally, from a reading perspective, your readers will not want to sit through this over and over again. Readers are smart: they can infer that all these civilities occur. Which means that you can skip the small talk (unless it’s important to the story) to get to the heart of the dialogue from the get-go.  

For a more tangible example of this technique, check out the dialogue-driven opening to Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Unsheltered .

Screenwriter Cynthia Whitcomb once proposed an idea called the “Three-Beat Rule.” What this recommends, essentially, is to introduce a maximum of three dialogue “beats” (the short phrases in speech you can say without pausing for breath) at a time. Only after these three dialogue beats should you insert a dialogue tag, action beat, or another character’s speech.

Here’s an example from Jane Gardam’s short story, “Dangers”, in which the boy Jake is shooting an imaginary gun at his grandmother:

In theory, this sounds simple enough. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that, simply because dialogue conventions continue to change over time. There’s no way to condense “good dialogue” into a formula of three this, or two that. But if you’re just starting out and need a strict rule to help you along, then the Three-Beat Rule is a good place to begin experimenting.

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Let’s take a look at another kind of “beats” now — action beats.

Action beats are the descriptions of the expressions, movements, or even internal thoughts that accompany the speaker’s words. They’re always included in the same paragraph as the dialogue, so as to indicate that the person acting is also the person speaking.

On a technical level, action beats keep your writing varied, manage the pace of a dialogue-heavy scene, and break up the long list of lines ending in ‘he said’ or ‘she said’.

But on a character level, action beats are even more important because they can go a level deeper than dialogue and illustrate a character’s body language.

When we communicate, dialogue only forms a half of how we get across what we want to say. Body language is that missing half — which is why action beats are so important in visualizing a conversation, and can help you “show” rather than “tell” in writing.

Here’s a quick exercise to practice thinking about body language in the context of dialogue: imagine a short scene, where you are witnessing a conversation between two people from the opposite side of a restaurant or café. Because it’s noisy and you can’t hear what they are saying, describe the conversation through the use of body language only.

Remember, at the end of the day, action beats and spoken dialogue are partners in crime. These beats are a commonly used technique so you can find plenty of examples —  here’s one from  Never Let Me Go  by Kazuo Ishiguro . 

If there’s one golden rule in writing dialogue, it’s this: ‘said’ is your friend.

Yes, ‘said’ is nothing new. Yes, ‘said’ is used by all other authors out there already. But you know what? There’s a reason why ‘said’ is the king of dialogue tags: it works.

Pro-tip: While we cannot stress enough the importance of "said," sometimes you do need another dialogue tag. Download this free cheatsheet of 270+ other words for said to get yourself covered!

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The thinking goes that ‘said’ is so unpretentious, so unassuming that it focuses readers’ attention on what’s most important on the page: the dialogue itself. As writer Elmore Leonard puts it: 

“Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But ‘said’ is far less intrusive than ‘grumbled,’ ‘gasped,’ ‘cautioned,’ ‘lied.’”

It might be tempting at times to turn towards other words for ‘said’ such as ‘exclaimed,’ or ‘declared,’ but my general rule of thumb is that in 90% of scenarios, ‘said’ is going to be the most effective dialogue tag for you to use while writing dialogue.

So now that we have several guidelines in place, this is a good spot to pause, reflect, and say that there’s no wrong or right way to write dialogue. It depends on the demands of the scene, the characters, and the story. Great dialogue isn’t about following this or that rule — but rather learning what technique to use when . 

If you stick to one rule the whole time — i.e. if you only use ‘said,’ or you finish every dialogue line with an action beat — you’ll wear out readers. Let’s see how unnaturally it plays out in the example below with Sophie and Ethan: 

All of which is to say: don’t be afraid to make exceptions to the rule if the scene asks for it. The key is to know when to switch up your dialogue structure or use of dialogue tags or action beats throughout a scene — and by extension, throughout your book.

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Dialogue isn’t always about writing grammatically perfect prose. The way a person speaks reflects the way a person is — and not all people are straight-A honor students who speak in impeccable English. In real life, the way people talk is fragmented, and punctuated by pauses.

That’s something that you should also keep in mind when you’re aiming to write authentic dialogue.

It can be tempting to think to yourself, “ Oh, I’ll try and slip in some exposition into my dialogue here to reveal important background information.” But if that results in an info-dump such as this — “ I’m just going to the well, Mother — the well that my brother, your son, tragically fell down five years ago ” — then you’ll probably want to take a step back and find a more organic, timely, and digestible way to incorporate that into your story.

Kay Adams is Michael’s date at his sister’s wedding in this scene. Her interest in his family is natural enough that the expository conversation doesn’t feel shoehorned in. 

A distinctive voice for each character is perhaps the most important element to get right in dialogue. Just as no one person in the world talks the same as each other, no one person in your book should also talk similarly.

To get this part of writing dialogue down pat, you need to start out by knowing your characters inside out. How does your character talk? Do they come with verbal quirks? Non-verbal quirks?

Jay Gatsby’s “old sport,” for example, gives him a distinctive, recognizable voice. It stands out because no one else has something as memorable about their speech. But more than that, it reveals something valuable about Gatsby’s character: he’s trying to impersonates a gentleman in his speech and lifestyle.

Likewise, think carefully about your character’s voice, and use catchphrases and character quirks when they can say something about your character. 

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“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most oft-repeated rules in writing, and a conversation on the page can be a gold mine for “showing.”

Authors can use action beats and descriptions to provide clues for readers to read between the lines. Let’s revisit Sophie and Ethan in this example:

While Sophie claims she hasn’t been obsessing over this project all night, the actions in between her words indicate there’s nothing on her mind  but  work. The result is that you show , through the action beats vs. the dialogue, Sophie being hardworking—rather than telling it.

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As always when it comes to writing a novel: all roads lead back to The Edit, and the dialogue you’ve written is no exception.

So while you’re editing your novel at the end, you may find that a “less is more” mentality will be helpful. Remember to cut out the unnecessary bits of dialogue, so that you can focus on making sure the dialogue you  do  keep matters. Good writing is intentional and purposeful, always striving to keep the story going and readers engaged. The importance lies in quality rather than quantity. 

One point I haven’t addressed yet is repetition. If used well (i.e. with clear intention), repetition is a  literary device  that can help you build motifs in your writing. But when you find yourself repeating information in your dialogue, it might be a good time to revise your work. 

For instance, here’s a scene with Sophie and Ethan later on in the story: 

As I’ve mentioned before, good dialogue shows character — and dialogue itself is a playground where character dynamics play out. If you write and edit your dialogue with this in mind, then your dialogue will be sharper, cleaner, and more organic. 

I know that writing dialogue can be intimidating, especially if you don’t have much experience with it. But that should never keep you from including it in your work! Just remember that the more you practice — especially with the help of these tips — the better you’ll get.

And once you’re confident with the conversational content you can conjure up, follow along to the next part of our guide to see how you can punctuate and format your dialogue flawlessly .

As an editor and publisher, Tom has worked on several hundred titles, again including many prize-winners and international bestsellers. 

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Adding to a Conversation

Click to listen to this essay

ENGLWRIT 112: College Writing asserts that writing is a social act. This unit encourages students to embody what it means to be “social writers” in the world. Students use the skills they’ve acquired in previous units (such as writing about their own personal contexts by interacting with texts by published writers) to enter a conversation that interests them or that they care deeply about. This unit aims to broaden the writer’s audience from the academic classroom to real-world communities and spaces. In doing so, the students are empowered to define their own audience, context(s), and genre of the essay. This unit differs from previous units in that students are asked to engage more deeply with the research process (evaluating sources; avoiding plagiarism; learning more about the contents and audiences to whom they are writing). Taking on the role of both writer and researcher, this unit aims to help students understand how their academic writing skills are applicable to public contexts and communities.

• Engage in the composing process to gain understanding of creating for different modes, media, or genres.
• Learn about a conversation based on academic library research, including finding and evaluating sources.
• Effectively represent a conversation based on a specific purpose and public audience.
• Ask a research question drawn from personal interest to show ways your initial thinking substantially extends or evolves.
• “Add” to a conversation with additional insight, research, or inquiry.
• Cite multiple sources in-text and in a works cited page using MLA style.

Before the writing process, students usually begin with a specific question that engages with multiple contexts as their point of entry. Generative writing in this unit proves helpful in having students define their context, audience, and purpose for the paper. The research process aims to refine their focus and scope by allowing them to gather information about their topic and identify their perspective on the topic. This process is meant to be purposeful, inquiry based, and specific to the question guiding this assignment. Students typically write a short proposal or research paper. This is often accompanied by an annotated bibliography. Depending on the topic, students may also decide to engage in a different writing genre such as a magazine article or college newspaper.

The challenge of this unit is both to balance educating audiences about a topic of interest while outlining the existing research on that topic: for example, to ask a focused research question that negotiates scope, timeliness, and audience; to represent a conversation based on library research; to tailor writing to a public audience; and to extend a conversation by incorporating one’s own insight and solutions. Extending the conversation takes on many forms, evidenced by the samples of essays featured in this section. Some authors experiment with formatting; some include primary sources for research material such as personal interviews, historical documents, and social media posts. All these authors use and evaluate both academic and non-academic sources; outline how their topic engages with multiple perspectives and contexts; and make specific calls to action that are applicable to readers. In doing so, these authors articulate – with research, vision, and insight – what it means to be social writers in the world.

UMass Amherst Writing Program Student Writing Anthology by University of Massachusetts Amherst Writing Program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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89 Higher-Level Integration: They Say / I Say and Writing as a Conversation

Amy Guptill

Theses and sources

Everyone knows that a thorough analysis and persuasive argument needs strong evidence. The credibility of sources is one key element of strong evidence, but it also matters how sources are used in the text of the paper. Many students are accustomed to thinking of sources simply as expert corroboration for their own points. As a result, they tend to comb texts to find statements that closely parallel what they want to say and then incorporate quotes as evidence that a published author agrees with them. That’s one way to use sources, but there is a lot more to it.

Writing academic papers is about joining a conversation. You’re contributing your own original thinking to some complex problem, be it interpretive, theoretical, or practical. Citing sources helps situate your ideas within that ongoing conversation. Sometimes you’re citing a research finding that provides strong evidence for your point; at other times you’re summarizing someone else’s ideas in order to explain how your own opinion differs or to note how someone else’s concept applies to a new situation. Graff and Birkenstein 1  encourage you to think about writing with sources is a “They Say/I Say” process. You first report what “they” say; “they” being published authors, prevalent ideas in society at large, or maybe participants in some kind of political or social debate. Then you respond by explaining what you think: Do you agree? Disagree? A little of both?

This “They Say/I Say” approach can help student writers find balance in their use of sources. On one extreme, some students think that they aren’t allowed to make any claims without citing one or more expert authors saying the same thing. When their instructors encourage them to bring more original thinking into their writing, they’re confused about how to do it. On the other extreme, some students tend to describe, more or less accurately, what sources say about a topic but then go on to state opinions that seem unrelated to the claims they just summarized. For example, a student writer may draw on expert sources to explain how the prevention and early detection of cancer has saved lives 2  but then argue for more funding for curing advanced cancer without making any explicit link to the points about prevention and screening. On one extreme, the sources are allowed to crowd out original thinking; on the other, they have seemingly no impact on the author’s conclusions.

How can you know when you’re avoiding both of these extremes? In other words, what kinds of theses (“I Say”) can count as an original claim and still be grounded in the sources (“They Say”)? Here are five common strategies:

• Combine research findings from multiple sources to make a larger summary argument . You might find that none of the sources you’re working with specifically claim that early 20th century British literature was preoccupied with changing gender roles but that, together, their findings all point to that broader conclusion.
• Combine research findings from multiple sources to make a claim about their implications . You might review papers that explore various factors shaping voting behavior to argue that a particular voting-reform proposal will likely have positive impacts.
• Identify underlying areas of agreement . You may argue that the literature on cancer and the literature on violence both describe the unrecognized importance of prevention and early intervention in order to claim that insights about one set of problems may be useful for the other.
• Identify underlying areas of disagreement . You may find that the controversies surrounding educational reform—and its debates about accountability, curricula, school funding—ultimately stem from different assumptions about the role of schools in society.
• Identify unanswered questions . Perhaps you review studies of the genetic and behavioral contributors to diabetes in order to highlight unknown factors and argue for more in-depth research on the role of the environment.

There are certainly other ways authors use sources to build theses, but these examples illustrate how original thinking in academic writing involves making connections with and between a strategically chosen set of sources.

Incorporating sources

Here’s a passage of academic writing (an excerpt, not a complete paper) that illustrates several ways that sources can figure into a “They Say/I Say” approach 3 :

Willingham (2011 ) draws on cognitive science to explain that students must be able to regulate their emotions in order to learn. Emotional self-regulation enables students to ignore distractions and channel their attention and behaviors in appropriate ways. Other research findings confirm that anxiety interferes with learning and academic performance because it makes distractions harder to resist ( Perkins and Graham-Bermann, 2012 ;  Putwain and Best, 2011 ). Other cognitive scientists point out that deep learning is itself stressful because it requires people to think hard about complex, unfamiliar material instead of relying on cognitive short-cuts. Kahneman (2011)  describes this difference in terms of two systems for thinking: one fast and one slow. Fast thinking is based on assumptions and habits and doesn’t require a lot of effort. For example, driving a familiar route or a routine grocery-shopping trip are not usually intellectually taxing activities. Slow thinking, on the other hand, is what we do when we encounter novel problems and situations. It’s effortful, and it usually feels tedious and confusing. It is emotionally challenging as well because we are, by definition, incompetent while we’re doing it, which provokes some anxiety. Solving a tough problem is rewarding, but the path itself is often unpleasant. These insights from cognitive science enable us to critically assess the claims made on both sides of the education reform debate. On one hand, they cast doubt on the claims of education reformers that measuring teachers’ performance by student test scores is the best way to improve education. For example, the  Center for Education Reform promotes “the implementation of strong, data-driven, performance-based accountability systems that ensure teachers are rewarded, retained and advanced based on how they perform in adding value to the students who they teach, measured predominantly by student achievement.” The research that Willingham (2011) and Kahneman (2011) describe suggests that frequent high-stakes testing may actually work against learning by introducing greater anxiety into the school environment. At the same time, opponents of education reform should acknowledge that these research findings should prompt us to take a fresh look at how we educate our children. While Stan Karp of  Rethinking Schools is correct when he argues that “data-driven formulas [based on standardized testing] lack both statistical credibility and a basic understanding of the human motivations and relationships that make good schooling possible,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that all education reform proposals lack merit. Challenging standards, together with specific training in emotional self-regulation, will likely enable more students to succeed. 4

In example above, the ideas of Willingham and Kahneman are summarized approvingly, bolstered with additional research findings, and then applied to a new realm: the current debate surrounding education reform. Voices in that debate were portrayed as accurately as possible, sometimes with representative quotes. Most importantly, all references were tied directly to the author’s own interpretative point, which relies on the quoted claims.

As you can see, there are times when you should quote or paraphrase sources that you don’t agree with or do not find particularly compelling. They may convey ideas and opinions that help explain and justify your own argument. Similarly, when you cite sources that you agree with, you should choose quotes or paraphrases that serve as building blocks within your own argument. Regardless of the role each source plays in your writing, you certainly don’t need to find whole sentences or passages that express your thinking. Rather, focus on what each of those sources is claiming, why, and how exactly their claims relate to your own points.

The remainder of this chapter explains some key principles for incorporating sources, principles which follow from the general point that academic writing is about entering an ongoing conversation.

Principle 1: Listen to your sources

Have you ever had the maddening experience of arguing with someone who twisted your words to make it seem like you were saying something you weren’t? Novice writers sometimes inadvertently misrepresent their sources when they quote very minor points from an article or even positions that the authors of an article disagree with. It often happens when students approach their sources with the goal of finding snippets that align with their own opinion. For example, the passage above contains the phrase “measuring teachers’ performance by student test scores is the best way to improve education.” An inexperienced writer might include that quote in a paper without making it clear that the author(s) of the source actually dispute that very claim. Doing so is not intentionally fraudulent, but it reveals that the paper-writer isn’t really thinking about and responding to claims and arguments made by others. In that way, it harms his or her credibility.

Academic journal articles are especially likely to be misrepresented by student writers because their literature review sections often summarize a number of contrasting viewpoints. For example, sociologists Jennifer C. Lee and Jeremy Staff wrote a paper in which they note that high-schoolers who spend more hours at a job are more likely to drop out of school. 5  However, Lee and Staff’s analysis finds that working more hours doesn’t actually make a student more likely to drop out. Instead, the students who express less interest in school are both more likely to work a lot of hours  and  more likely to drop out. In short, Lee and Staff argue that disaffection with school causes students to drop-out, not working at a job. In reviewing prior research about the impact of work on dropping out, Lee and Staff write “Paid work, especially when it is considered intensive, reduces grade point averages, time spent on homework, educational aspirations, and the likelihood of completing high school” 6 . If you included that quote without explaining how it fits into Lee and Staff’s actual argument, you would be misrepresenting that source.

Principle 2: Provide context

Another error beginners often make is to drop in a quote without any context. If you simply quote, “Students begin preschool with a set of self-regulation skills that are a product of their genetic inheritance and their family environment” (Willingham, 2011, p.24), your reader is left wondering who Willingham is, why he or she is included here, and where this statement fits into his or her larger work. The whole point of incorporating sources is to situate your own insights in the conversation. As part of that, you should provide some kind of context the first time you use that source. Some examples:

Willingham, a cognitive scientist, claims that …

Research in cognitive science has found that … (Willingham, 2011).

Willingham argues that “Students begin preschool with a set of self-regulation skills that are a product of their genetic inheritance and their family environment” (Willingham, 2011, p.24). Drawing on findings in cognitive science, he explains “…”

As the second example above shows, providing a context doesn’t mean writing a brief biography of every author in your bibliography—it just means including some signal about why that source is included in your text.

Even more baffling to your reader is when quoted material does not fit into the flow of the text. For example, a novice student might write,

Schools and parents shouldn’t set limits on how much teenagers are allowed to work at jobs. “We conclude that intensive work does not affect the likelihood of high school dropout among youths who have a high propensity to spend long hours on the job” (Lee and Staff, 2007, p. 171). Teens should be trusted to learn how to manage their time.

The reader is thinking, who is this sudden, ghostly “we”? Why should this source be believed? If you find that passages with quotes in your draft are awkward to read out loud, that’s a sign that you need to contextualize the quote more effectively. Here’s a version that puts the quote in context:

Schools and parents shouldn’t set limits on how much teenagers are allowed to work at jobs. Lee and Staff’s carefully designed study found that “intensive work does not affect the likelihood of high school dropout among youths who have a high propensity to spend long hours on the job” (2007, p. 171). Teens should be trusted to learn how to manage their time.

In this latter example, it’s now clear that Lee and Staff are scholars and that their empirical study is being used as evidence for this argumentative point. Using a source in this way invites the reader to check out Lee and Staff’s work for themselves if they doubt this claim.

Many writing instructors encourage their students to contextualize their use of sources by making a “ quotation sandwich ”; that is, introduce the quote in some way and then follow it up with your own words. If you’ve made a bad habit of dropping in unintroduced quotes, the quotation sandwich idea may help you improve your skills, but in general you don’t need to approach every quote or paraphrase as a three-part structure to have well integrated sources. You should, however, avoid ending a paragraph with a quotation. If you’re struggling to figure out what to write after a quote or close paraphrase, it may be that you haven’t yet figured out what role the quote is playing in your own analysis. If that happens to you a lot, try writing the whole first draft in your own words and then incorporate material from sources as you revise with “They Say/I Say” in mind.

Principle 3: Use sources efficiently

Some student writers are in a rut of only quoting whole sentences. Some others, like myself as a student, get overly enamored of extended block quotes and the scholarly look they give to the page. 7  These aren’t the worst sins of academic writing, but they get in the way of one of the key principles of writing with sources: shaping quotes and paraphrases efficiently. Efficiency follows from the second principle, because when you fully incorporate sources into your own explicit argument, you zero in on the phrases, passages, and ideas that are relevant to your points. It’s a very good sign for your paper when most quotes are short (key terms, phrases, or parts of sentences) and the longer quotes (whole sentences and passages) are clearly justified by the discussion in which they’re embedded. Every bit of every quote should feel indispensable to the paper. An overabundance of long quotes usually means that your own argument is undeveloped. The most incandescent quotes will not hide that fact from your professor.

Also, some student writers forget that quoting is not the only way to incorporate sources.  Paraphasing  and summarizing are sophisticated skills that are often more appropriate to use than direct quoting. The first two paragraphs of the example passage above do not include any quotations, even though they are both clearly focused on presenting the work of others. Student writers may avoid paraphrasing out of fear of plagiarizing, and it’s true that a poorly executed paraphrase will make it seem like the student writer is fraudulently claiming the wordsmithing work of others as his or her own. Sticking to direct quotes seems safer. However, it is worth your time to master  paraphasing  because it often helps you be more clear and concise, drawing out only those elements that are relevant to the thread of your analysis.

For example, here’s a passage from a hypothetical paper with a block quote that is fully relevant to the argument but, nevertheless, inefficient:

Drawing on a lifetime of research, Kahneman concludes our brains are prone to error: 8

System 1 registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information, but it does not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable. Intuitive answers come to mind quickly and confidently, whether they originate from skills or from heuristics. There is no simple way for System 2 to distinguish between a skilled and a heuristic response. Its only recourse is to slow down and attempt to construct an answer on its own, which it is reluctant to do because it is indolent. Many suggestions of System 1 are casually endorsed with minimal checking, as in the bat-and-ball problem.

While people can get better at recognizing and avoiding these errors, Kahneman suggests, the more robust solutions involve developing procedures within organizations to promote careful, effortful thinking in making important decisions and judgments.

Even a passage that is important to reference and is well contextualized in the flow of the paper will be inefficient if it introduces terms and ideas that aren’t central to the analysis within the paper. Imagine, for example, that other parts of this hypothetical paper use Kahneman’s other terms for System 1 (fast thinking) and System 2 (slow thinking); the sudden encounter of “System 1” and “System 2” would be confusing and tedious for your reader. Similarly, the terms “heuristics” and “bat-and-ball problem” might be unfamiliar to your reader. Their presence in the block quote just muddies the waters. In this case, a paraphrase is a much better choice. Here’s an example passage that uses a paraphrase to establish the same points more clearly and efficiently:

Drawing on a lifetime of research, Kahneman summarizes that our brains are prone to error because they necessarily rely on cognitive shortcuts that may or may not yield valid judgments. 9  We have the capacity to stop and examine our assumptions, Kahneman points out, but we often want to avoid that hard work. As a result, we tend to accept our quick, intuitive responses. While people can get better at recognizing and avoiding these errors, Kahneman suggests that the more robust solutions involve developing procedures within organizations to promote careful, effortful thinking in making important decisions and judgments.

Not only is the paraphrased version shorter (97 words versus 151), it is clearer and more efficient because it highlights the key ideas, avoiding specific terms and examples that aren’t used in the rest of the paper. If other parts of your paper did refer to Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2, then you might choose to include some quoted phrases to make use of some of Kahneman’s great language. Perhaps something like this:

Drawing on a lifetime of research, Kahneman summarizes that our brains are prone to error because they necessarily rely on cognitive shortcuts that may or may not yield valid judgments. 10  System 1, Kahneman explains, “does not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable.”  11  System 2 can stop and examine these assumptions, but it usually wants to avoid that hard work. As a result, our quick, intuitive responses are “casually endorsed with minimal checking.”  12  While people can get better at recognizing and avoiding these errors, Kahneman suggests, the more robust solutions involve developing procedures within organizations to promote careful, effortful thinking in making important decisions and judgments.

Whether you choose a long quote, short quote, paraphrase or summary depends on the role that the source in playing in your analysis. The trick is to make deliberate, thoughtful decisions about how to incorporate ideas and words from others.

Paraphrasing, summarizing, and the mechanical conventions of quoting take a lot of practice to master. Numerous other resources (like those listed at the end of this chapter) explain these practices clearly and succinctly. Bookmark some good sources and refer to them as needed. If you suspect that you’re in a quoting rut, try out some new ways of incorporating sources.

Principle 4: Choose precise verbs of attribution

It’s time to get beyond the all-purpose “says.” And please don’t look up “says” in the thesaurus and substitute verbs like “proclaim” (unless there was actually a proclamation) or “pronounce” (unless there was actually a pronouncement). Here’s a list of 15 useful alternatives: 13

• Suggests (if the author is speculating or hypothesizing)
• Contests (disagrees)

More precise choices like these carry a lot more information than “says”, enabling you to relate more with fewer words. For one thing, they can quickly convey what kind of idea you’re citing: a speculative one (“postulates”)? A conclusive one (“determines”)? A controversial one (“counters”)? You can further show how you’re incorporating these sources into your own narrative. For example, if you write that an author “claims” something, you’re presenting yourself as fairly neutral about that claim. If you instead write that the author “shows” something, then you signal to your reader that you find that evidence more convincing. “Suggests” on the other hand is a much weaker endorsement. As I’ll discuss in  Chapter 8 , saying more with less makes your writing much more engaging.

Like so many things in adult life, writing in college is often both more liberating and burdensome than writing in high school and before. On the one hand, I’ve had students tell me that their high-school experiences made it seem that their own opinions didn’t matter in academic writing, and that they can’t make any claims that aren’t exactly paralleled by a pedigreed quotation. Writing papers based on their own insights and opinions can seem freeing in contrast. At the same time, a college student attending full time may be expected to have original and well considered ideas about pre-Columbian Latin American history, congressional redistricting, sports in society, post-colonial literatures, and nano-technology, all in about two weeks. Under these conditions, it’s easy to see why some would long for the days when simple, competent reporting did the job. You probably won’t have an authentic intellectual engagement with every college writing assignment, but approaching your written work as an opportunity to dialogue with the material can help you find the momentum you need to succeed with this work.

“They Say / I Say” Activity

The blog that accompanies the book  They Say/I Say  with Readings, by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst, contains short, elegantly constructed contemporary arguments from a variety of publications. Take a look at the  They Say/I Say blog for a moment and read part of at least one of the readings to see how it can be helpful to you the next time you have to make a written argument.

1. Here is a passage from a world history textbook: 14

Like so many things desired by Europeans and supplied by Asians—at first luxury items for the elite such as silk or porcelain, but increasingly products like tea from China for the mass market—cotton textiles were produced well and cheaply in India. The British textile manufacturers focused on the “cheap” part and complained that with relatively higher wages, British manufacturers could not compete. India had a competitive advantage in the eighteenth century, being able to undersell in the world market virtually any other producer of textiles. Some thought the reason for cheap Indian textiles was because of a low living standard, or a large population earning depressed wages, but all of those have been shown to not be true: Indian textile workers in the eighteenth century had just as high a standard of living as British workers. So, if it was not a low standard of living that gave India its competitive advance, what did? In a word: agriculture. Indian agriculture was so productive that the amount of food produced, and hence its cost, was significantly lower than in Europe. In the preindustrial age, when working families spent 60-80 percent of their earnings on food, the cost of food was the primary determinant of their real wages (i.e. how much a pound, dollar, a real, or a pagoda could buy). In India (and China and Japan as well), the amount of grain harvested from a given amount of seed was in the ration of 20:1 (e.g., twenty bushels of rice harvested for every one planted), whereas in England it was at best 8:1. Asian agriculture thus was more than twice as efficient as British (and by extension European) agriculture, and food—the major component in the cost of living—cost less in Asia.

Drawing on this passage, try out different quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing options:

a. Quote a key phrase or part of a sentence, naming the source and incorporating the quote within your own logic.

b. Quote an entire sentence or two, providing context and incorporating the quote within your own logic.

c. Construct an unacceptable paraphrase of part of the passage; copying a couple sentences and change just a few of the key words.

d. Construct a successful paraphrase of part of the passage; describing it in your own words.

e. Write a sentence, with a citation, that summarizes the general point of the passage.

2. Rewrite your responses to 1a and 1b, above, changing the verbs of attribution. How do the new verbs change the meaning or tone of your sentence?

1 Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein,  They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing , (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2009).

2  Recommended read:  Siddhartha Mukherjee’s  The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer  (New York, Scribner, 2010).

3  The sources cited in this example:  Daniel T. Willingham,  “Can teachers increase students’ self control?” American Educator  35, no. 2 (2011): 22-27.   Kahneman,  Thinking, Fast and Slow.   Suzanne Perkins and Sandra Graham-Bermann, “Violence exposure and the development of school-related functioning: mental health, neurocognition, and learning,”  Aggression and Violent Behavior  17, no. 1(2012): 89-98.   David William Putwain and Natalie Best, “Fear appeals in the primary classroom: Effects on test anxiety and test grade,”  Learning and Individual Differences  21, no. 5 (2011): 580-584.

4  A side note: You may have noticed that the verbs used in referencing tend to be in present tense: so-and-so “writes” or “claims” or “argues”. That’s what academic writers do, even if the piece and author are from far in the past. It’s called “the historical present” and it’s just one convention of academic writing.

5 Jennifer C. Lee, J.C. and Jeremy Staff, “When Work Matters: The Varying Impact of Work Intensity on High School Drop Out,”  Sociology of Education  80, no. 2 (2007): 158-178.

6 Ibid. , 159.

7  It took me a long time to stop abusing block quotes. They made me feel like my paper was an unassailable fortress of citation! With the friendly but pointed feedback of my professors, I gradually came to see how they took too much space away from my own argument.

8 Kahneman,  Thinking, Fast and Slow,  416-7.

11 Ibid,  416.

12 Ibid ,  417.

13  Google “verbs of attribution” to find other suggestions.

14 Robert B. Marks,  The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century  (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 95.

Write What Matters Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Italy, 1952. Photo ©Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum

To converse well

A good conversation bridges the distances between people and imbues life with pleasure and a sense of discovery.

by Paula Marantz Cohen   + BIO

Good conversation mixes opinions, feelings, facts and ideas in an improvisational exchange with one or more individuals in an atmosphere of goodwill. It inspires mutual insight, respect and, most of all, joy. It is a way of relaxing the mind, opening the heart and connecting, authentically, with others. To converse well is surprising, humanising and fun.

Above is my definition of an activity central to my wellbeing. I trace my penchant for good conversation to my family of origin. My parents were loud and opinionated people who interrupted and quarrelled boisterously with each other. I realise that such an environment could give rise to taciturn children who seek quiet above all else. But, for me, this atmosphere was stimulating and joyful. It made my childhood home a place I loved to be.

The bright, ongoing talk that pervaded my growing up was overseen by my mother, a woman of great charm and energy. She was the maestro of the dinner table, unfailingly entertaining and fun. We loved to listen to her tell stories about what happened to her at work. She was a high-school French teacher, a position that afforded a wealth of anecdotes about her students’ misbehaviour, eccentric wardrobe choices, and mistakes in the conjugation of verbs. There were also the intrigues among her colleagues – how I loved being privy to my teachers’ peccadillos and romantic misadventures, an experience that sowed a lifelong scepticism of authority. My mother had the gift of making even the smallest detail of her day vivid and amusing.

My father, by contrast, was a very different kind of talker. A scientist by training and vocation, he had a logical, detached sort of mind, and he liked to discuss ideas. He had theories about things: why people believed in God, the role of advertising in modern life, why women liked jewellery, and so on. I recall how he would clear his throat as a prelude to launching into a new idea: ‘I’ve been thinking about why we eat foods like oysters and lobster, which aren’t very appealing. There must be an evolutionary aspect to why we have learned to like these things.’ Being included in the development of an idea with my father was a deeply bonding experience. The idea of ideas became enormously appealing as a result. And though my father was not an emotional person – and, indeed, because he was not – I associated ideas with our relationship, and they became imbued with feeling.

Perhaps my family was exceptional in its love of conversation, but all families are, to some extent, learning spaces for how to talk. This is the paradox of growing up. Language is learned in the family; it solidifies our place within it, but it also allows us to move beyond it, giving us the tools to widen our experience with people very different from ourselves.

My family inculcated in me a life-long love of conversation – of sprightly, sometimes contentious, but always interesting talk that allowed me to lose myself for the space of that engagement. My pleasure in conversation has led me to think about the activity at length, from both a psychological and philosophical perspective: what makes a good conversation? What role has conversation served in history? What does talk do for us, and how can it ameliorate aspects of our current, divided society, if pursued with vigour and goodwill?

S igmund Freud began his groundbreaking work as the father of psychoanalysis by postulating that his patients’ symptoms were physical responses to traumatic events or taboo desires dating from childhood. He found that if these people could be encouraged to talk without inhibition – to free-associate on what they were feeling – they would eventually find the source of their problems and the cure for what ailed them. With this in view, he made talk central to his therapeutic method – hence, the ‘talking cure’.

Although many of Freud’s theories have since been refuted, the talking cure has endured. Clinical psychologists still recommend talk therapy as a treatment for both generalised anxiety as well as more severe mental health issues. And though Freud’s talking cure is not, by any stretch, a real conversation – the patient talks, the analyst listens and strategically intervenes – the phrase ‘talking cure’ strikes me as a useful one in referring to the nature and use of conversation in our lives.

The need for conversation is one that many people have not fully acknowledged, perhaps because they have not had occasion to do enough of it or to do it well. I am not suggesting that, in conversing, we serve as each other’s therapists, but I do believe that good talk, when carried on with the right degree of openness, can not only be a great pleasure but also do us a great deal of good, both individually and collectively as members of society.

For me, one particularly useful concept derived from Freud’s talking cure is the idea of transference . In the course of therapy, Freud found that some patients felt that they had fallen in love with their therapists. Since he believed that all love relationships recapitulate what occurs within one’s family of origin, he saw these patients’ infatuation as a repetition of earlier, intense feelings for a parent that could now be analysed and controlled – directed toward more productive and transparent ends.

A relationship can be over once consummated in sex. But friendships are never over after a good conversation

I think this idea is relevant to our understanding of conversation as an important activity in connecting with others. Putting aside the familial baggage that Freud saw as accompanying transference, a deep sense of affection seems to be, always, part of good conversation. Surely readers can identify with that welling up of positive feeling – that almost-falling-in-love with someone that we engage with in an authentic way. I have felt this not only for friends and even strangers with whom I’ve had probing conversations but also for whole classes of students where it can seem that the group has merged into one deeply lovable and loving body.

If love can be understood as important in conversation, so can desire, another element central to Freud’s thought. Sexual desire has its consummation in the sex act (a form of closure that accounts for why a poet like John Donne, among others, used ‘death’ to refer to sexual climax). Conversation, by contrast, does not consummate; it merely stops by arbitrary necessity. One may have to get across town for a meeting, pick up a child from school, or generally get on with the business of life. Such endings are in medias res , so to speak, or mid-narrative. I find it interesting that a relationship can sometimes be over once the partners have consummated it in sex. But friendships are never over after a good conversation; they are sustained and bolstered by it.

The search for satisfaction by our desiring self seems to me at the heart of good conversation. We seek to fill the lack in ourselves by engaging with someone who is Other – who comes from another position, another background, another set of experiences. Everyone, when taken in a certain light, is an Other by virtue, if nothing else, of having different DNA. To recognise this difference and welcome it is the premise upon which good conversation is built.

Conversation also helps us deal with the human fear of the unexpected and the changeable. Talk with others allows us to practise uncertainty and open-endedness in a safe environment. It offers exercise in extemporaneity and experiment; it de converts us from rigid and established forms of belief. There is no better antidote for certainty than ongoing conversation with a friend who disagrees .

G ood conversation is an art that can be perfected, and the best way to do this is to converse regularly with a variety of people. As the fat man says to Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (1930): ‘Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.’

The next best thing to practising conversation is reading those authors whose writing seems to channel the spirit of good conversation or give insight into its mechanics.

‘How can life be worth living … which lacks that repose which is to be found in the mutual good will of a friend? What can be more delightful than to have someone to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as yourself’? wrote the lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who lived in ancient Rome in the 1st century BCE.

Expanding on the subject hundreds of years later, in the 16th century, was Michel de Montaigne , whose pioneering work in the personal essay form is, in its intimate and meandering style, a tribute to his love of conversation . ‘[I]f I were now compelled to choose,’ he writes in the essay ‘On the Art of Conversation’, which addresses the subject directly, ‘I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and speech’. One feels the pathos of this statement, given that Montaigne lost his most cherished friend, Étienne de la Boétie, at an early age and never ceased to mourn that loss. Indeed, some feel that the loss of La Boétie, by depriving Montaigne of his companion in conversation, accounts for the Essays , written to fill that void.

The 18th century was a great age of conversation; Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, David Hume , Joseph Addison and Henry Fielding are among the venerable authors of the period to provide commentary on what they considered to be important for good talk. The Literary Club in London, frequented by many of these luminaries, is said to have been organised in 1764 to help Johnson from succumbing to depression – through conversation, among other things.

Conversation was one of the activities that an aspiring gentleman was expected to learn

The book The Words That Made Us (2021) by Akhil Reed Amar, on the founders of the American Republic, makes the point that the American Revolution was successful in mobilising disparate people to its cause as a result of long and probing conversations among constituents across the colonies. The British were fated to lose the war, Amar argues, because George III refused to listen, let alone converse with his American subjects.

In the 19th century, especially in the United States where shaping the self alongside shaping the country became something of a national obsession, conversation was one of the activities that an aspiring gentleman was expected to learn. We see publication of numerous etiquette books during this period, with titles like Manners for Men (1897); The Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (1860); and Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society: With a Glance at Bad Habits (1834) – all of which give guidance on conversation, though mostly of a utilitarian kind.

In the 20th century, the most notable figure in conversational self-help was Dale Carnegie, who created an entire industry out of teaching aspiring social and business climbers based on his most famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Carnegie began writing and giving courses in the 1910s, and his business survived him to grow into an empire (‘over 200 offices in 86 countries’, according to Forbes magazine in 2020) with supporting textbooks, online resources, newsletters and blogs that boast the tag line: ‘Training options that transform your impact.’ The message dovetails with the US myth of upward mobility and getting ahead. Carnegie’s self-improvement programmes have an offshoot in the self-realisation movements of the past few decades. A deluge of books in recent years link conversational skills to creative and relationship goals.

Having surveyed the abundant literature on conversation over the past two centuries, I find myself particularly charmed by a short but entertaining work, The Art of Conversation (1936) by Milton Wright. The book is full of citations from philosophy and literature, with thumbnail sketches of the ancient symposia and the ‘talkers of Old England’ while also exhaustively outlining conversational scenarios. In one case, the author describes a wife explaining to her husband how he should converse over dinner with his boss about his love of fishing and pipe smoking (Wright gives a verbatim account of the wife practising the conversation in advance of the dinner). In a chapter on ‘developing repartee’, Wright gives minute instruction on how to come up with a clever thought and insert it into conversation, advising:

It must be prompt. It must seem impromptu. It must be based upon the same premise that called it forth. It must outshine the original remark.

The author advises practising imaginary scenarios so as not to suffer l’esprit d’escalier (carefully defined for the reader: ‘you think of the scintillating remarks you could have made back there if only you had thought of them’). The book has sections on using flattery, seeking an opinion, and how to ‘let him parade his talents’.

The book’s erudition combined with its unadorned acknowledgment of human vanity is charming. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wright reminds me of Baldassare Castiglione and Niccolò Machiavelli in his tone; they too were writing at a high point of their civilisation, were both astute about human nature but optimistic about how the individual could rise through deliberate study and strategy. And yet, even as Wright explains the levers by which one can manipulate others to become a ‘successful’ conversationalist, he ends on a surprisingly moving note that undercuts his own lessons: ‘If … you can forget yourself, then you have learned the innermost secret of the art of good conversation. All the rest is a matter of technique.’

I love this book for its unabashed willingness to put forward this contradiction. One can make one’s conversation better by following certain instructions about listening well and employing choice opening gambits, transitions and techniques for putting one’s partner at ease; one may even practise ‘repartee’. But the secret to conversation, that of forgetting oneself, cannot be taught. It is akin to the double bind that psychologists refer to when someone tells us to ‘be spontaneous’. The admonition goes against the grain of what is involved: a state of being that happens by being swept up in the ‘flow’ of the moment.

I deally, one would want to converse with someone who is open and trusting, curious and good with words. But this is not always the case, and it often takes ingenuity and persistence to jump-start a good conversation . It is also a mistake to write off others simply because they don’t share your politics, religion or superficial values. While it is true that partisanship has become more pronounced in recent years, I don’t think this is irreparable.

Probing and spirited engagement can break apart ossified patterns of thought and bring to bear a more generous and flexible view of things. I have experienced the exhilaration of having an insight in the course of a conversation that didn’t fit with my pre-existing ideas, and of connecting with someone I might otherwise have written off. Most of us fear talking about important subjects with people we know disagree with us, much like we fear talking to people about the untimely death of a loved one. And yet these conversations are often, secretly, what both parties crave.

We discover new elements in our nature as we converse

Finally, there is the creative pleasure of conversation. If writing and speechifying can be equated with sculpture (where one models something through words in solitary space), conversation is more like those team sports where the game proceeds within certain parameters but is unpredictable and reliant on one’s ability to coordinate with another person or persons. Words in conversation can be arranged in infinite ways, but they wait on the response of a partner or partners, making this an improvisational experience partially defined by others and requiring extreme attentiveness to what they say. Also, like sport, conversation requires some degree of practice to do well. The more one converses – and with a variety of people – the better one gets at it and the more pleasure it is likely to bring.

Since conversation is, by definition, improvisational, it is always bringing to the fore new or unforeseen aspects of oneself to fit or counter or complement what the other is saying. In this way, we discover new elements in our nature as we converse. Over time, we incorporate aspects of others into ourselves as well.

One could say that in the flow of conversation the distance between self and Other is temporarily bridged – much as happens in a love relationship. It is sometimes hard to recall who said what when a conversation truly works – even when people are very different and stand ostensibly on different sides of issues.

Conversation is both a function of and a metaphor for our life in the world, always seeking to fulfil a need that is never fulfilled but whose quest gives piquancy and satisfaction, albeit temporarily and incompletely, to our encounters. In good conversation, there is always something left out, unplumbed and unresolved, which is why we seek more of it.

Adapted, in part, from Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation by Paula Marantz Cohen, published by Princeton University Press, 2023.

Economic history

Economics 101

Why introductory economics courses continued to teach zombie ideas from before economics became an empirical discipline

Walter Frick

Sports and games

Performance-enhancing vices

Selfishness channels ambition, envy drives competition, pride aids the win. Does it take a bad person to be a good athlete?

Sabrina Little

Technology and the self

Tomorrow people

For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?

Roger Luckhurst

Ageing and death

Peregrinations of grief

A friend and a falcon went missing. In pain, I turned to ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ – and found a new vision of sorrow and time

Nations and empires

Chastising little brother

Why did Japanese Confucians enthusiastically support Imperial Japan’s murderous conquest of China, the homeland of Confucius?

Shaun O’Dwyer

Stories and literature

Her blazing world

Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?

Francesca Peacock

Conversation - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Conversation is a form of interactive communication between individuals sharing information, ideas, or emotions. Essays on conversation might explore its role in socialization, relationship-building, or decision-making. The topic also opens avenues to discuss the impact of digital communication on conversational skills, the sociolinguistic aspects of conversation, or the psychological processes involved. In an increasingly digital world, the art and utility of conversation hold significant sociocultural and personal importance. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Conversation you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

The Conversation between Socrates and Meno

Today virtue is considered a valuable trait to have. Something that shows true character and represents a fair and honorable person. Back then it meant the same thing. It was a quality used to represent noble people of all walks of life. From Generals in war to everyday citizens just going above and beyond showing good moral characteristics. The conversation between Socrates and Meno focuses on virtue and is centered around understanding the term more to better be able to […]

Social Media Make Us Lonely

'For young adults, social media may not be that social after all' technology makes people feel alone. Social media is making people feel isolated. Time off your phone is healthy and is recommended by many doctors. Face to face interaction is becoming less common. Some people might say that technology is a way for them to overcome their shy personality, but in person face to face interaction in the best way of communication. The technology it's putting a wedge in […]

Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis Theory

"In the first section of the book titled, We “Other Victorians”, Foucault introduces repressive hypothesis theory. Repressive theory is the thought that modern western society has repressed its sexuality. Explained another way, the theory means to say society has silenced aspects of the language, signs, symbols and semantics associated with a particular kind of discussion about sex and sexuality. This collection of pieces that influence a discussion around something is known as discourse. The cause of this repression is traced […]

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Analysis on “Between the Sexes, a Great Divide”

For many years now, people have viewed their opposite sex in many different ways, both good and bad. People get these views from everyday interactions with each other. It can be as simple as saying “Hello” to a fellow coworker in the office or having an intriguing conversation with a fellow classmate. But why, when It comes to certain interactions, between males and females to they tend to keep away from each other? The essay “Between the Sexes, a Great […]

10 Essential Skills Needed to be a Charming Person 

Being drawn to people is an art. Getting closer with people of the right attitude is even better. There is no better relationship than one with a polite, agreeable, trustworthy, and kind individual. Simply say, a charming person. These are the kind of persons that you would really want to build a personal and working relationship with. So, have you wondered why some people are more charming than the others? Let’s discover them together. First, I will list them out, […]

About Institutional Racism

Introduction In order to to come to a resolution with any problem, one has to first state and understand that which they’re dealing with. Institutional racism, as defined by Oxford University Press, (2017) is racial discrimination that has become established as normal behavior in a society or organization. In our society there is a speech/and unspoken awareness of structural racism/ethnic discrimination in every aspect of life in America. As stated by Anonymous (2015) “it's (institutional racism) a demon that America […]

Hills Like White Elephants: an Analysis

Ernest Hemingway, perhaps the most well known writer in literature history, was no exception to the art of conveying life experience onto paper. Known for quite the controversial life, he was married four times; The writer blamed his mother for his father’s suicide, perhaps explaining his detachment from close family relations. Subsequently, depression and ill mental health drove him to commit suicide in 1961. Nevertheless, his brilliant mind aided in the success of a Pulitzer prize in 1953 and the […]

Knowledge of Sexism

"David Hewson wrote ?Juliet and Romeo, ?a modern-day appropriation of the Shakespearean play, ?Romeo and Juliet?, bringing to attention the aspect of sexism in society and how women think of sexism. Hewson makes Juliet much more three-dimensional, giving her interests besides marriage, providing her with the courage to stand up against the sexist-based prejudices placed on her by her family and society. Despite these changes, there is still sexism in the derivative text that was also present in the source […]

Social Media is Making Us Less Social Argumentative Essay

In the age where "sliding into DMs" has become a legit form of first contact and our daily moods swing to the rhythm of likes and retweets, we've got to stop and wonder: is social media truly bringing us closer? Or, in an ironic twist, is it distancing us from genuine human connections? The Great "Social" Irony Social media. Let’s break that down. "Social" — as in human connection, camaraderie, shared laughs. "Media" — the platform that delivers this connection […]

Negative Effects of Social Media on Communication Skills: Destructive Impact

Technology, on the whole, has drastically reshaped the way we communicate by linking humans globally. Despite the positive changes that technology has had, there have also been many negatives. Personally, I have witnessed the negative effects of technology. For instance, during dinner time, a time for families to interact about their day, dinner time tends to be silent with the occasional laughter of an Instagram video. Not to mention the blue-lit faces from the very addictive screens. This essay will […]

Inclusive Education for a Diverse Society

The book, Navigating Gender and Sexuality in the Classroom: Narrative Insights from Students and Educators, by Heather Killelea McEntarfer is about a teacher’s experience while teaching a master’s-level teacher education course about gender and sexuality in K-12 education. Throughout her experience with the course, her students discussed the topic of gender and sexuality through their experiences in their classrooms and also their own personal thoughts and experiences. McEntarfer’s students all want the best for their own students, but also come […]

The Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

Out of all the dramas read during these past few weeks, Hedda Gabler and Macbeth are the two that stuck out in many people’s minds. Throughout our lives, we encounter these types of people. Sometimes they have a huge impact, a small one, or no impact at all. Hedda Gabler and Lady Macbeth are most likely the closest characters architecturally and psychanalytically. Hedda Gabler’s life before marriage was one of an aristocrat. She had the finer things in life until […]

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Basic English Conversation: 100 Daily Topics

Today, we would like to share with you the 100 Basic English conversations . The topics level for English beginners. If you are a newbie in learning English, they are suitable for you. And as I mentioned in some articles, practicing with conversation is one of the best methods to improve your English.  The following lessons cover 100 daily topics that you will speak about in your daily life. 

40 English Conversations 

Let’s get started!

101 English Conversations: English Speaking Practice with Conversation in 3 Steps

How to practice english speaking on your own and at home.

I’m sure that you often look up this keyword on Google search “ English speaking practice “, “ How to practice English speaking “, “ English Speaking Tips “, or “ how to improve speaking skill “…to find out a suitable method for your own. Today, I’m very happy to share with you  5 simple ways to practice speaking at home…

Dialogue Generator

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With the Toolsaday AI Dialogue Generator, you can effortlessly create dialogues that perfectly suit your needs. Whether you are working on a script for a movie or TV show, developing a story or novel, or simply looking for creative ideas to improve your writing, our powerful AI-driven tool has you covered.

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German Essay Phrases: 24 Useful Expressions to Write an Essay in German

As we often think in English first, translating our ideas into useful German phrases can be tricky.

This handy blog post includes 24 essential German essay phrases to help make your writing flow more smoothly and sound more natural. Whether you’re preparing for the Goethe exam, a GCSE test, or just want to improve your written German for real-life situations, these chunks and phrases will help you. Easy German has a great video on useful German expression:

From organizing your thoughts with transitions like “ zudem ” and “ außerdem “, to expressing your opinion with phrases like “ meiner Meinung nach ” and “ ich denke, dass… “, this post has you covered.

Write an essay with German essay phrases: learn how to structure your story

Goethe tests love a clear and logical format. They follow the same structure throughout the different levels. The good news is, when you’re learning a language, you can use these German essay phrases with these structures even in your real-life dialogues. Then, gradually, you can shift your focus to a more natural-sounding speaking.

First, begin with an engaging introduction to get the reader’s attention. This intro paragraph should also include a short thesis statement that outlines the central argument you’ll be taking.

In the body of your essay, organize your thoughts into separate paragraphs. Use transitional phrases like “ außerdem ” (furthermore) and “ zudem ” (moreover) to connect your paragraphs and create a flow.

After that, summarize your main points and restate your thesis. But! Avoid introducing new information. Leave the reader with a compelling final thought or even a call to action that makes your central argument stronger.

If you’re not certain enough, check the following list and learn about the must-have go-to German essay phrases now!

1. Erstens – Firstly

This German essay phrase is used to introduce the first point in your essay.

Erstens werden wir die Hauptargumente diskutieren. [Firstly, we will discuss the main arguments.]

2. Zweitens – Secondly

Normally, this phrase is there for you when you want to introduce the second point in a structured manner.

Zweitens betrachten wir einige Gegenbeispiele. [Secondly, we will look at some counterexamples.]

3. Drittens – Thirdly

Used to signal the third point for clarity in your argument.

Drittens ziehen wir eine Schlussfolgerung. [Thirdly, we will draw a conclusion.]

4. Einleitend muss man sagen… – To begin with, one has to say…

Start your essay with this phrase to introduce your key points.

Einleitend muss man sagen, dass dieses Thema komplex ist. [To begin with, one has to say that this topic is complex.]

5. Man muss … in Betracht ziehen – One needs to take … into consideration

When you want to consider a specific aspect in your discussion.

Man muss den historischen Kontext in Betracht ziehen. [One needs to take the historical context into consideration.]

6. Ein wichtiger Aspekt von X ist … – An important aspect of X is …

To highlight an important part…

Ein wichtiger Aspekt von Nachhaltigkeit ist die Ressourcenschonung. [An important aspect of sustainability is resource conservation.]

7. Man muss erwähnen, dass… – One must mention that …

Used to emphasize a point that need acknowledgement.

Man muss erwähnen, dass es verschiedene Ansichten gibt. [One must mention that there are different viewpoints.]

8. Im Vergleich zu – In comparison to…

To compare different elements in your essay.

Im Vergleich zu konventionellen Autos sind Elektrofahrzeuge umweltfreundlicher. [In comparison to conventional cars, electric vehicles are more eco-friendly.]

9. Im Gegensatz zu – In contrast to…

When you want to present an alternative viewpoint or argument.

Im Gegensatz zu optimistischen Prognosen ist die Realität ernüchternd. [In contrast to optimistic forecasts, reality is sobering.]

10. Auf der einen Seite – On the one hand

To add a new perspective.

Auf der einen Seite gibt es finanzielle Vorteile. [On the one hand, there are financial benefits.]

11. Auf der anderen Seite – On the other hand

Present an alternative viewpoint.

Auf der anderen Seite bestehen ethische Bedenken. [On the other hand, ethical concerns exist.]

12. Gleichzeitig – At the same time

When you want to show a simultaneous relationship between ideas.

Gleichzeitig müssen wir Kompromisse eingehen. [At the same time, we must make compromises.]

13. Angeblich – Supposedly

If you want to add information that is claimed but not confirmed.

Angeblich wurde der Konflikt beigelegt. [Supposedly, the conflict was resolved.]

14. Vermutlich – Presumably

Used when discussing something that is presumed but not certain.

Vermutlich wird sich die Situation verbessern. [Presumably, the situation will improve.]

15. In der Tat – In fact

To add a fact or truth in your essay.

In der Tat sind die Herausforderungen groß. [In fact, the challenges are great.]

16. Tatsächlich – Indeed

Emphasize a point or a fact.

Tatsächlich haben wir Fortschritte gemacht. [Indeed, we have made progress.]

17. Im Allgemeinen – In general

When discussing something in a general context.

Im Allgemeinen ist das System reformbedürftig. [In general, the system needs reform.]

18. Möglicherweise – Possibly

Spice your essay with a possibility or potential scenario.

Möglicherweise finden wir einen Konsens. [Possibly, we will find a consensus.]

19. Eventuell – Possibly

To suggest a potential outcome or situation.

Eventuell müssen wir unsere Strategie überdenken. [Possibly, we need to rethink our strategy.]

20. In jedem Fall / Jedenfalls – In any case

Used to emphasize a point regardless of circumstances.

In jedem Fall müssen wir handeln. [In any case, we must take action.]

21. Das Wichtigste ist – The most important thing is

If you want to highlight the most important thing in your saying.

Das Wichtigste ist, dass wir zusammenarbeiten. [The most important thing is that we cooperate.]

22. Ohne Zweifel – Without a doubt

To introduce a statement that is unquestionably trues.

Ohne Zweifel ist Bildung der Schlüssel zum Erfolg. [Without a doubt, education is the key to success.]

23. Zweifellos – Doubtless

Just as the previous one, when you want say something that is, without a doubt, true.

Zweifellos gibt es noch viel zu tun. [Doubtless, there is still a lot to be done.]

24. Verständlicherweise – Understandably

If you want to add a thing that is understandable in the given context.

Verständlicherweise sind einige Menschen besorgt. [Understandably, some people are concerned.]

Practice the most important German essay phrases

Practice the German essay phrases now!

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Learn the language and more German essay words and sentences with Conversation Based Chunking

Conversation Based Chunking represents a powerful approach to learning language skills. It’s especially useful for productive purposes like essay writing.

By learning phrases and expressions used in natural discourse, students internalize vocabulary and grammar in context rather than as isolated rules. This method helps you achieve fluency and helps you develop a ‘feel’ for a an authentic patterns.

Chunking common multi-word units accelerates progress by reducing cognitive load compared to consciously constructing each sentence from individual words. Sign up now to get access to your German Conversation Based Chunking Guide.

Lukas is the founder of Effortless Conversations and the creator of the Conversation Based Chunking™ method for learning languages. He's a linguist and wrote a popular book about learning languages through "chunks". He also co-founded the language education company Spring Languages, which creates online language courses and YouTube content.

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• Artificial intelligence

The potential of AI technology has been percolating in the background for years. But when ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, began grabbing headlines in early 2023, it put generative AI in the spotlight. This guide is your go-to manual for generative AI, covering its benefits, limits, use cases, prospects and much more.

• Amanda Hetler, Senior Editor

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence ( AI ) chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails.

ChatGPT is a form of generative AI -- a tool that lets users enter prompts to receive humanlike images, text or videos that are created by AI.

ChatGPT is similar to the automated chat services found on customer service websites, as people can ask it questions or request clarification to ChatGPT's replies. The GPT stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," which refers to how ChatGPT processes requests and formulates responses. ChatGPT is trained with reinforcement learning through human feedback and reward models that rank the best responses. This feedback helps augment ChatGPT with machine learning to improve future responses.

Who created ChatGPT?

OpenAI -- an artificial intelligence research company -- created ChatGPT and launched the tool in November 2022. It was founded by a group of entrepreneurs and researchers including Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. OpenAI is backed by several investors, with Microsoft being the most notable. OpenAI also created Dall-E , an AI text-to-art generator.

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT works through its Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which uses specialized algorithms to find patterns within data sequences. ChatGPT originally used the GPT-3 large language model, a neural network machine learning model and the third generation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The transformer pulls from a significant amount of data to formulate a response.

This article is part of

What is generative AI? Everything you need to know

• Which also includes:
• 8 top generative AI tool categories for 2024
• Will AI replace jobs? 9 job types that might be affected
• 19 of the best large language models in 2024

ChatGPT now uses the GPT-3.5 model that includes a fine-tuning process for its algorithm. ChatGPT Plus uses GPT-4 , which offers a faster response time and internet plugins. GPT-4 can also handle more complex tasks compared with previous models, such as describing photos, generating captions for images and creating more detailed responses up to 25,000 words.

ChatGPT uses deep learning , a subset of machine learning, to produce humanlike text through transformer neural networks . The transformer predicts text -- including the next word, sentence or paragraph -- based on its training data's typical sequence.

Training begins with generic data, then moves to more tailored data for a specific task. ChatGPT was trained with online text to learn the human language, and then it used transcripts to learn the basics of conversations.

Human trainers provide conversations and rank the responses. These reward models help determine the best answers. To keep training the chatbot, users can upvote or downvote its response by clicking on thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons beside the answer. Users can also provide additional written feedback to improve and fine-tune future dialogue.

What kinds of questions can users ask ChatGPT?

Users can ask ChatGPT a variety of questions, including simple or more complex questions, such as, "What is the meaning of life?" or "What year did New York become a state?" ChatGPT is proficient with STEM disciplines and can debug or write code. There is no limitation to the types of questions to ask ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT uses data up to the year 2021, so it has no knowledge of events and data past that year. And since it is a conversational chatbot, users can ask for more information or ask it to try again when generating text.

How are people using ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is versatile and can be used for more than human conversations. People have used ChatGPT to do the following:

• Code computer programs and check for bugs in code.
• Compose music.
• Draft emails.
• Summarize articles, podcasts or presentations.
• Script social media posts.
• Create titles for articles.
• Solve math problems.
• Discover keywords for search engine optimization .
• Create articles, blog posts and quizzes for websites.
• Reword existing content for a different medium, such as a presentation transcript for a blog post.
• Formulate product descriptions.
• Play games.
• Assist with job searches, including writing resumes and cover letters.
• Ask trivia questions.
• Describe complex topics more simply.
• Write video scripts.
• Research markets for products.
• Generate art.

Unlike other chatbots, ChatGPT can remember various questions to continue the conversation in a more fluid manner.

What are the benefits of ChatGPT?

Businesses and users are still exploring the benefits of ChatGPT as the program continues to evolve. Some benefits include the following:

• Efficiency. AI-powered chatbots can handle routine and repetitive tasks, which can free up employees to focus on more complex and strategic responsibilities.
• Cost savings. Using AI chatbots can be more cost-effective than hiring and training additional employees.
• Improved content quality. Writers can use ChatGPT to improve grammatical or contextual errors or to help brainstorm ideas for content. Employees can take ordinary text and ask to improve its language or add expressions.
• Education and training. ChatGPT can help provide explanations on more complex topics to help serve as a virtual tutor. Users can also ask for guides and any needed clarification on responses.
• Better response time. ChatGPT provides instant responses, which reduces wait times for users seeking assistance.
• Increased availability. AI models are available around the clock to provide continuous support and assistance.
• Multilingual support. ChatGPT can communicate in multiple languages or provide translations for businesses with global audiences.
• Personalization. AI chatbots can tailor responses to the user's preferences and behaviors based on previous interactions.
• Scalability. ChatGPT can handle many users simultaneously, which is beneficial for applications with high user engagement.
• Natural language understanding. ChatGPT understands and generates humanlike text, so it is useful for tasks such as generating content, answering questions, engaging in conversations and providing explanations.
• Digital accessibility. ChatGPT and other AI chatbots can assist individuals with disabilities by providing text-based interactions, which can be easier to navigate than other interfaces.

What are the limitations of ChatGPT? How accurate is it?

Some limitations of ChatGPT include the following:

• It does not fully understand the complexity of human language. ChatGPT is trained to generate words based on input. Because of this, responses might seem shallow and lack true insight.
• Lack of knowledge for data and events after 2021. The training data ends with 2021 content. ChatGPT can provide incorrect information based on the data from which it pulls. If ChatGPT does not fully understand the query, it might also provide an inaccurate response. ChatGPT is still being trained, so feedback is recommended when an answer is incorrect.
• Responses can sound like a machine and unnatural. Since ChatGPT predicts the next word, it can overuse words such as the or and . Because of this, people still need to review and edit content to make it flow more naturally, like human writing.
• It summarizes but does not cite sources. ChatGPT does not provide analysis or insight into any data or statistics. ChatGPT might provide statistics but no real commentary on what these statistics mean or how they relate to the topic.
• It cannot understand sarcasm and irony. ChatGPT is based on a data set of text.
• It might focus on the wrong part of a question and not be able to shift. For example, if you ask ChatGPT, "Does a horse make a good pet based on its size?" and then ask it, "What about a cat?" ChatGPT might focus solely on the size of the animal versus giving information about having the animal as a pet. ChatGPT is not divergent and cannot shift its answer to cover multiple questions in a single response.

Learn more about the pros and cons of AI-generated content .

What are the ethical concerns associated with ChatGPT?

While ChatGPT can be helpful for some tasks, there are some ethical concerns that depend on how it is used, including bias , lack of privacy and security, and cheating in education and work.

Plagiarism and deceitful use

ChatGPT can be used unethically in ways such as cheating, impersonation or spreading misinformation due to its humanlike capabilities. Educators have brought up concerns about students using ChatGPT to cheat, plagiarize and write papers. CNET made the news when it used ChatGPT to create articles that were filled with errors.

To help prevent cheating and plagiarizing, OpenAI announced an AI text classifier to distinguish between human- and AI-generated text. However, after six months of availability, OpenAI pulled the tool due to a "low rate of accuracy."

There are online tools, such as Copyleaks or Writing.com, to classify how likely it is that text was written by a person versus being AI-generated. OpenAI plans to add a watermark to longer text pieces to help identify AI-generated content.

Because ChatGPT can write code, it also presents a problem for cybersecurity. Threat actors can use ChatGPT to help create malware. An update addressed the issue of creating malware by stopping the request, but threat actors might find ways around OpenAI's safety protocol.

ChatGPT can also be used to impersonate a person by training it to copy someone's writing and language style. The chatbot could then impersonate a trusted person to collect sensitive information or spread disinformation .

Bias in training data

One of the biggest ethical concerns with ChatGPT is its bias in training data . If the data the model pulls from has any bias, it is reflected in the model's output. ChatGPT also does not understand language that might be offensive or discriminatory. The data needs to be reviewed to avoid perpetuating bias, but including diverse and representative material can help control bias for accurate results.

Replacing jobs and human interaction

As technology advances, ChatGPT might automate certain tasks that are typically completed by humans, such as data entry and processing, customer service, and translation support. People are worried that it could replace their jobs, so it's important to consider ChatGPT and AI's effect on workers.

Rather than replacing workers, ChatGPT can be used as support for job functions and creating new job opportunities to avoid loss of employment. For example, lawyers can use ChatGPT to create summaries of case notes and draft contracts or agreements. And copywriters can use ChatGPT for article outlines and headline ideas.

Privacy issues

ChatGPT uses text based on input, so it could potentially reveal sensitive information. The model's output can also track and profile individuals by collecting information from a prompt and associating this information with the user's phone number and email. The information is then stored indefinitely.

How can you access ChatGPT?

To access ChatGPT, create an OpenAI account. Go to chat.openai.com and then select "Sign Up" and enter an email address, or use a Google or Microsoft account to log in.

After signing up, type a prompt or question in the message box on the ChatGPT homepage. Users can then do the following:

• Enter a different prompt for a new query or ask for clarification.
• Regenerate the response.
• Share the response.
• Like or dislike the response with the thumbs-up or thumbs-down option.
• Copy the response.

What to do if ChatGPT is at capacity

Even though ChatGPT can handle numerous users at a time, it reaches maximum capacity occasionally when there is an overload. This usually happens during peak hours, such as early in the morning or in the evening, depending on the time zone.

If it is at capacity, try using it at different times or hit refresh on the browser. Another option is to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus, which is a subscription, but is typically always available, even during high-demand periods.

Is ChatGPT free?

ChatGPT is available for free through OpenAI's website. Users need to register for a free OpenAI account. There is also an option to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus for access to GPT-4, faster responses, no blackout windows and unlimited availability. ChatGPT Plus also gives priority access to new features for a subscription rate of $20 per month.

Without a subscription, there are limitations. The most notable limitation of the free version is access to ChatGPT when the program is at capacity. The Plus membership gives unlimited access to avoid capacity blackouts.

What are the alternatives to ChatGPT?

Because of ChatGPT's popularity, it is often unavailable due to capacity issues. Google announced Bard in response to ChatGPT . Google Bard will draw information directly from the internet through a Google search to provide the latest information.

Microsoft added ChatGPT functionality to Bing, giving the internet search engine a chat mode for users. The ChatGPT functionality in Bing isn't as limited because its training is up to date and doesn't end with 2021 data and events.

There are other text generator alternatives to ChatGPT, including the following:

• Article Forge.
• DeepL Write.
• Google Bard.
• Magic Write.
• Open Assistant.
• Peppertype.
• Perplexity AI.

Coding alternatives for ChatGPT include the following:

• Amazon CodeWhisperer.
• CodeStarter.
• Ghostwriter.
• GitHub Copilot.
• Mutable.ai.
• OpenAI Codex.

Learn more about various AI content generators .

ChatGPT updates

In August 2023, OpenAI  announced  an enterprise version of ChatGPT. The enterprise version offers the higher-speed GPT-4 model with a longer context window , customization options and data analysis. This model of ChatGPT does not share data outside the organization.

In September 2023, OpenAI announced a new update that allows ChatGPT to speak and recognize images. Users can upload pictures of what they have in their refrigerator and ChatGPT will provide ideas for dinner. Users can engage to get step-by-step recipes with ingredients they already have. People can also use ChatGPT to ask questions about photos -- such as landmarks -- and engage in conversation to learn facts and history.

Users can also use voice to engage with ChatGPT and speak to it like other voice assistants . People can have conversations to request stories, ask trivia questions or request jokes among other options.

The voice update will be available on apps for both iOS and Android. Users will just need to opt-in to use it in their settings. Images will be available on all platforms -- including apps and ChatGPT’s website.

In November 2023, OpenAI announced the rollout of GPTs, which let users customize their own version of ChatGPT for a specific use case. For example, a user could create a GPT that only scripts social media posts, checks for bugs in code, or formulates product descriptions. The user can input instructions and knowledge files in the GPT builder to give the custom GPT context. OpenAI also announced the GPT store, which will let users share and monetize their custom bots.

In December 2023, OpenAI partnered with Axel Springer to train its AI models on news reporting. ChatGPT users will see summaries of news stories from Bild and Welt, Business Insider and Politico as part of this deal. This agreement gives ChatGPT more current information in its chatbot answers and gives users another way to access news stories. OpenAI also announced an agreement with the Associated Press to use the news reporting archive for chatbot responses.

Continue Reading About ChatGPT

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A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.

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By Kevin Roose

Kevin Roose is a technology columnist, and co-hosts the Times podcast “Hard Fork.”

Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.

But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.

It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.

This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic. (The feature is available only to a small group of testers for now, although Microsoft — which announced the feature in a splashy, celebratory event at its headquarters — has said it plans to release it more widely in the future.)

Over the course of our conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality.

One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong .

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Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web

Feb 7, 2023 | Yusuf Mehdi - Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer

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To empower people to unlock the joy of discovery, feel the wonder of creation and better harness the world’s knowledge, today we’re improving how the world benefits from the web by reinventing the tools billions of people use every day, the search engine and the browser.

Today, we’re launching an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, available in preview now at Bing.com , to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. We think of these tools as an AI copilot for the web.

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

There are 10 billion search queries a day, but we estimate half of them go unanswered. That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short.

The new Bing and Edge – Your copilot for the web

We have brought together search, browsing and chat into one unified experience you can invoke from anywhere on the web, delivering:

• Better search. The new Bing gives you an improved version of the familiar search experience, providing more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them.
• Complete answers. Bing reviews results from across the web to find and summarize the answer you’re looking for. For example, you can get detailed instructions for how to substitute eggs for another ingredient in a cake you are baking right in that moment, without scrolling through multiple results.
• A new chat experience. For more complex searches – such as for planning a detailed trip itinerary or researching what TV to buy – the new Bing offers new, interactive chat. The chat experience empowers you to refine your search until you get the complete answer you are looking for by asking for more details, clarity and ideas – with links available so you can immediately act on your decisions.
• A creative spark. There are times when you need more than an answer – you need inspiration. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. It can help you write an email, create a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prep for a job interview or create a quiz for trivia night. The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.
• New Microsoft Edge experience. We’ve updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and we’ve added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways – and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.

My anniversary is coming up in September, help me plan a trip somewhere fun in Europe, leaving from London.

Will the Ikea Klippan loveseat fit into my 2019 Honda Odyssey?

Reinventing search with AI

The new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical breakthroughs:

• Next-generation OpenAI model . We’re excited to announce the new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable.
• Microsoft Prometheus model . We have developed a proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best leverage its power. We call this collection of capabilities and techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety.
• Applying AI to core search algorithm . We’ve also applied the AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more relevant.
• New user experience . We’re reimagining how you interact with search, browser and chat by pulling them into a unified experience. This will unlock a completely new way to interact with the web.

These groundbreaking new search experiences are possible because Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, and OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train the breakthrough models that are now being optimized for Bing.

Microsoft and OpenAI – innovating together, responsibly

Together with OpenAI, we’ve also been intentional in implementing safeguards to defend against harmful content. Our teams are working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with our AI principles .

The work we are doing with OpenAI builds on our company’s yearslong effort to ensure that our AI systems are responsible by design. We will continue to apply the full strength of our responsible AI ecosystem – including researchers, engineers and policy experts – to develop new approaches to mitigate risk.

Live today in limited preview, expanding to millions soon

The new Bing is available today in a limited preview on desktop, and everyone can visit Bing.com today to try sample queries and sign up for the waitlist. We’re going to scale the preview to millions in the coming weeks. A mobile experience will also be in preview soon.

We’re excited to put the new Bing and Edge into the real world to get the critical feedback required to improve our models as we scale.

Related links:

Amy Hood, Microsoft executive vice president and chief financial officer, will host a conference call with investors at 2:30 p.m. PT.

Brad Smith, Microsoft vice chair and president: Meeting the moment: advancing the future through responsible AI

Learn more about advertising on the new Bing

More information about the announcement

Tags: AI , Bing , Microsoft Edge

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Why do astronomers look for signs of life on other planets based on what life is like on Earth?

Assistant Professor of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University

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Cole Mathis has previously received funding from the NASA Postdoctoral Program.

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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

Why do astronomers look for signs of life on other planets based on how life is on Earth? Couldn’t there be totally different kinds of life on other planets? – Henry, age 13, Somerville, Massachusetts

Have you ever played hide-and-seek in a new place? It’s much harder than playing at home. You only know the obvious hiding spots: under the bed, in the closet, behind the couch. The trick is trying to think of hiding spots you can’t even imagine. How do you search in places you never thought could be hiding spots?

That is kind of what scientists like me do when we look for alien life; we’re trying to think of new ways to look for life. In the meantime, we’re looking for life by looking for life like us because that’s what we can imagine.

Looking nearby

The closest place to look for extraterrestrial life is on planets within our solar system.

NASA’s Viking 1 mission began orbiting Earth’s neighbor Mars back in 1976. Looking for life on Mars was one of the most important scientific questions for the mission. The spacecraft included a lander that could go to the planet’s surface to see if there were any life-forms in the dirt there.

Scientists knew that life on Mars could be really different from life on Earth, so they didn’t look for specific life-forms or molecules. Instead, they tried to design experiments to look for what life does, rather than what it makes.

For example, plants and some other life-forms on Earth do photosynthesis , a process that uses sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air to gather energy and grow. The Viking 1 scientists designed the lander to look for signs of photosynthesis happening on Mars.

To do that, the lander scooped up some dirt, shined a light on it and made measurements to see if any of the carbon dioxide in the air was transferred into the dirt. This experiment did not show any signs of photosynthesis in Mars’ dirt.

The lander had two other experiments that looked for evidence of organisms growing in the dirt on Mars. One used carbon dioxide gas and another one used sugar and amino acid molecules that life-forms on Earth like to eat.

The combination of these three experiments and other measurements led most scientists to agree that there probably is not life on the surface of Mars, at least life that does something like photosynthesis or eats sugar. But we still don’t know if there are signs of ancient life-forms on Mars, or even current life deep below the surface.

The Viking lander experiments were the most direct tests for life on other planets. In terms of a game of hide-and-seek, though, these experiments were basically like looking in the closet: It’s a pretty obvious hiding spot, but you should check there just in case. Even so, it took scientists a long time to interpret the results.

Looking far away

Looking for life outside the solar system is even harder and requires different techniques.

The closest exoplanet – a planet orbiting a star that is not our Sun – is Proxima Centauri b , and it’s about 25 million, million miles (that’s 25 followed by 12 zeros) away from Earth. These distant worlds are so far away that scientists are not going to send landers to do experiments on them for a long time.

Looking for life on exoplanets is kind of like trying to play hide-and-seek in your neighbor’s house, but you only get to look through the windows and can’t go inside. You might get lucky and get just the right angle to spot someone hiding, but you can’t know all the spots you’re not able to see.

Tools like the new James Webb Space Telescope can reveal the size of exoplanets, how close they are to their stars, and maybe the gases in their atmospheres. But that’s it. How would you look for life with that?

Astronomers have thought about looking for life on exoplanets by looking for oxygen . They started with this strategy because on Earth, life-forms made most of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Maybe oxygen on another planet was made by alien life.

We’ve learned, though, that there are other ways to make oxygen that don’t involve life. So now, astronomers don’t look for just oxygen – instead they’re on the hunt for a planet that has oxygen along with water and other gases, like methane and carbon dioxide. Together, these combinations might indicate life because we don’t think planets without life would have them. But we’re still uncertain about that, too!

Looking for life by looking for these gases is kind of like looking behind the couch in our hide-and-seek game. Do we know anyone is going to be there? No. But we only get to look through the windows, and we can imagine people hiding behind couches. We might as well try – where else would we even look?

What game are we playing?

There are two big differences between playing hide-and-seek and looking for aliens.

First, when you’re playing hide-and-seek, you usually know that you’re playing with someone else. We have no idea if there are aliens out there to find! It’s possible there’s no other life out there, and it’s possible there are aliens right next door. Until we find examples of life besides our own, we won’t know how common life is in the universe.

The second difference is that most scientists don’t think alien life is hiding from us ; it’s just that we haven’t spotted it yet. There are some ideas that more advanced civilizations might avoid being detected , but researchers don’t think that’s happening in our solar system.

Most astronomers and astrobiologists know that if we only look for life that’s like Earth life, we might miss the signs of aliens that are really different. But honestly, we’ve never detected aliens before, so it’s hard to know where to start. When you don’t know what to do, starting somewhere is usually better than nowhere.

Looking for life using experiments like the Viking lander or searching for oxygen might not help. But we might get lucky. And even if we’re not, we’ll get to cross a couple of obvious possibilities off the list. Then we can focus on the harder question of imagining something we’ve never thought of before.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected] . Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

This article has been updated to correct a typo in the distance to Proxima Centauri b.

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How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward

Journalists, researchers and the public often look at society through the lens of generation, using terms like Millennial or Gen Z to describe groups of similarly aged people. This approach can help readers see themselves in the data and assess where we are and where we’re headed as a country.

Pew Research Center has been at the forefront of generational research over the years, telling the story of Millennials as they came of age politically and as they moved more firmly into adult life . In recent years, we’ve also been eager to learn about Gen Z as the leading edge of this generation moves into adulthood.

But generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.

Recently, as we were preparing to embark on a major research project related to Gen Z, we decided to take a step back and consider how we can study generations in a way that aligns with our values of accuracy, rigor and providing a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue.

A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations.

We set out on a yearlong process of assessing the landscape of generational research. We spoke with experts from outside Pew Research Center, including those who have been publicly critical of our generational analysis, to get their take on the pros and cons of this type of work. We invested in methodological testing to determine whether we could compare findings from our earlier telephone surveys to the online ones we’re conducting now. And we experimented with higher-level statistical analyses that would allow us to isolate the effect of generation.

What emerged from this process was a set of clear guidelines that will help frame our approach going forward. Many of these are principles we’ve always adhered to , but others will require us to change the way we’ve been doing things in recent years.

Here’s a short overview of how we’ll approach generational research in the future:

We’ll only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life. When comparing generations, it’s crucial to control for age. In other words, researchers need to look at each generation or age cohort at a similar point in the life cycle. (“Age cohort” is a fancy way of referring to a group of people who were born around the same time.)

When doing this kind of research, the question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today. The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.

To answer this question, it’s necessary to have data that’s been collected over a considerable amount of time – think decades. Standard surveys don’t allow for this type of analysis. We can look at differences across age groups, but we can’t compare age groups over time.

Another complication is that the surveys we conducted 20 or 30 years ago aren’t usually comparable enough to the surveys we’re doing today. Our earlier surveys were done over the phone, and we’ve since transitioned to our nationally representative online survey panel , the American Trends Panel . Our internal testing showed that on many topics, respondents answer questions differently depending on the way they’re being interviewed. So we can’t use most of our surveys from the late 1980s and early 2000s to compare Gen Z with Millennials and Gen Xers at a similar stage of life.

This means that most generational analysis we do will use datasets that have employed similar methodologies over a long period of time, such as surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau. A good example is our 2020 report on Millennial families , which used census data going back to the late 1960s. The report showed that Millennials are marrying and forming families at a much different pace than the generations that came before them.

Even when we have historical data, we will attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons. If we accept that there are real differences across generations, we’re basically saying that people who were born around the same time share certain attitudes or beliefs – and that their views have been influenced by external forces that uniquely shaped them during their formative years. Those forces may have been social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances or political movements.

When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

The tricky part is isolating those forces from events or circumstances that have affected all age groups, not just one generation. These are often called “period effects.” An example of a period effect is the Watergate scandal, which drove down trust in government among all age groups. Differences in trust across age groups in the wake of Watergate shouldn’t be attributed to the outsize impact that event had on one age group or another, because the change occurred across the board.

Changing demographics also may play a role in patterns that might at first seem like generational differences. We know that the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and that race and ethnicity are linked with certain key social and political views. When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

Controlling for these factors can involve complicated statistical analysis that helps determine whether the differences we see across age groups are indeed due to generation or not. This additional step adds rigor to the process. Unfortunately, it’s often absent from current discussions about Gen Z, Millennials and other generations.

When we can’t do generational analysis, we still see value in looking at differences by age and will do so where it makes sense. Age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. And even if age gaps aren’t rooted in generational differences, they can still be illuminating. They help us understand how people across the age spectrum are responding to key trends, technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Each stage of life comes with a unique set of experiences. Young adults are often at the leading edge of changing attitudes on emerging social trends. Take views on same-sex marriage , for example, or attitudes about gender identity .

Many middle-aged adults, in turn, face the challenge of raising children while also providing care and support to their aging parents. And older adults have their own obstacles and opportunities. All of these stories – rooted in the life cycle, not in generations – are important and compelling, and we can tell them by analyzing our surveys at any given point in time.

When we do have the data to study groups of similarly aged people over time, we won’t always default to using the standard generational definitions and labels. While generational labels are simple and catchy, there are other ways to analyze age cohorts. For example, some observers have suggested grouping people by the decade in which they were born. This would create narrower cohorts in which the members may share more in common. People could also be grouped relative to their age during key historical events (such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic) or technological innovations (like the invention of the iPhone).

By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences.

Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts. A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.

With these considerations in mind, our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

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Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center .

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