The Etiquette of Speech

How to stop talking and listen

Photo by Juri Gianfrancesco on Unsplash

Recently I made the argument that in an age of distraction, offering someone your attention with your eyes is one of the most powerful acts of love you can give someone. We all want to be attended to, and if we don’t get attended to in positive, healthy, godly ways we’ll find perverse ways to be attended to. In that article I used OnlyFans and AI as examples of perverse ways people pursue attention, but you could easily find a million other examples. The point is, in that article I focused on the eyes, and I stand by that focus. I think literal eye contact is critical and increasingly a lost art. But as I wrote about in a later article, another lost art is speaking to one another. And that’s what I want to focus on today. In that article I made the case that one reason we don’t have many good friendships is that we have gotten out of the practice of speaking and reaching out to people. And I think that’s true. But upon reflection, it’s also true that what matters is how we speak. Or put differently, how we don’t speak. How we listen. One reason people are drawn to AI chatbots is that they will always listen. And I worry that many of us haven’t cultivated that skill ourselves. We can’t compete with AI. Maybe we can attend to another person with our eyes, but can we attend with our ears as well, or must we dominate the conversation? We need to cultivate temperance in speech so that we can attend to people with our ears and words as well as our eyes.

There are three grave errors I think we can fall into when it comes to speech etiquette, and we should be wary of each of them.

The first is passive listening, and it usually goes along with breaking eye contact. A friend comes to us to discuss something; whether it is important or not does not matter, they feel the need to share it, so it matters. And we start to listen and even give some nods and sounds of approval, but our eyes and (most importantly) our mind begins to wander to other things: tasks we have to complete, a person walking by, a text we just received, a passing thought, whatever. And so we listen without listening. The thing to know about passive listening is that the other person knows you aren’t listening. It’s obvious. You aren’t getting away with anything. I understand some people have trouble concentrating for various reasons, but to as much extent as it’s in your power, you ought to devote yourself to listening to the person you are talking to. Because when you are not really listening, you’re not picking up on all the subtle clues they are giving about how they really feel, what they really think, what they really need to hear from you at that moment. Of course, this is difficult to do because our devices are constantly calling us to be “forever elsewhere.” But that’s why this is part of the virtue of temperance. It takes discipline to develop the virtue over time.

The second grave error is the opposite of passive listening, and that is talking too much. A friend comes to you to share something, and you feel like you immediately have something to share in return, a similar experience, your own problems, advice, whatever it may be. So you passionately begin your lecture. You feel like you are blessing them with your contribution, adding something meaningful, connecting to them with your experience, but if you look carefully at their eyes and body movements, you would see that they are eager to share more. That this moment isn’t about you. That the appropriate thing to do is to give pauses in your speech to allow them to jump in with their perspective. This is especially important when you are in a group of friends and you know that several people will want to voice their opinion. Naturally a part of you will feel the pull to dominate the conversation, to take the chance to speak your mind before others take over because you know you have something important to say. But charity and humility should temper that feeling and allow you to permit others to speak instead. Don’t assume you have all the answers. You don’t. It may be that once you give up your spot by ceasing to speak, you’ll never get a chance to finish your brilliant idea. That’s okay. It’s okay not to say everything that you think is important. Wait patiently for another opportunity, and if it never comes, that’s fine. This is an important skill to develop in life.

The third error is interrupting, and it’s a terrible habit we should all work on breaking. Just because our minds have something interesting to say, doesn’t mean we have a right to interrupt someone else to interject our thoughts. This is basic, essential, civic discourse, but I’m afraid that we still need to be reminded of it. Maybe technology has conditioned us to think of everything as asynchronous and therefore there is not “interrupting” as such. I don’t know. All I know is that people interrupt each other too often and it shouldn’t be. When you interrupt someone you not only stop attending to them, you communicate that they aren’t worth attending to. You are the one who needs attending to. And of course, you do. You matter, too. But insisting on your own superior significance in a conversation (for that is what interrupting is) is no way to acknowledge that you deserve to be attended to.

Here’s where I think many of us have lost the art of the signal and lost the art of recognizing the signal. When you want to interject something, but you don’t want to interrupt, there are physical and audible ways to signal that. A gesture of the hand, a short “Well, uh,” a look on your face. These clues (which don’t get communicated online) tell the other person that you have a point to make about something they said and that it feels urgent to you. Now, this system depends on the other person recognizing and respecting the signal. Some people notice them and ignore them. Some people don’t notice them at all. That’s okay. In these situations, you wait for an opening in the conversation, and jump in when you can. What you don’t do is force your way into the center of the conversation by being louder and more persistent than others.

I’m not claiming to be an expert at listening or speaking. But I do know this. It hurts when someone doesn’t listen to you. It’s draining when someone talks and talks and never lets you speak. It stings when someone interrupts you. As Christians, we have a calling to love our neighbor, and that includes disciplining our speech and our ears and our eyes to attend to them fully. Not dominating conversations, not interrupting all the time, not passively listening, but being embodied, patient, humble listeners and speakers for the sake of others. This requires a lifetime’s effort, I think. Some of us are just born talkers. Others of us have been trained to interrupt. We have habits we need to break. But we can break them through the power of the Holy Spirit.