2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
This article will be useful to everyone who needs to write for work, speak to the public, teach a subject, or just be able to make people reach out to you in everyday life.
Let's imagine that I want to tell you about candles.
Option 1. New Year is just around the corner, and I want to help you choose a candle that will fill your home with a tangerine scent and your heart with anticipation of the holiday.
Candles are very easy to choose. You should not be led to offers "on the action" from the minimarket across the street. Some cheap ones smell so bad that you'd rather spread toilet air freshener around your apartment than light the candle wick again. Choose candles with essential oils: natural scents sound much thinner, more pleasant and refined than annoying, heavy notes saturated with pseudo-perfumed chemical solutions.
Option 2. Now, let me teach you, dear friend, the art of choosing a candle in a supermarket. And no, don't roll your eyes like that, don't wave your hand at me from under a cheap coat. Do not shout, they say, you yourself know everything, do not swing at me with lemonades and bags. Now I will teach you everything well!
Did you notice the difference?
The secret of a good storyteller is to shove your literary genius into a bag, tame your ego and turn soul to soul to the interlocutor, without resorting to a know-it-all tone, without humiliating or signing for the other person
A condescending tone and didactic sayings are the last things I want to read and listen to when I speak with a colleague.
Respect and the manifestation of trust can dispose a person to another for a long time: even if the hierarchical levels are different.
We always understand why we open this or that article; we come to this or that teacher; we start a conversation with this or that person. Wanting to appear smart and thereby attract the attention of others, we often look pitiful. Modesty was praised by the knights for a reason. It makes no sense for a true expert to boast: his qualifications are perfectly illustrated by his work.
I propose to get rid of condescension! Any unreasonable generalizations (and they are always such, because it is impermissible to think that we know everything about our readers) sound patronizing and create a distance between the listener and the speaker.
Therefore, we need to get rid of generalizations.
Here are some language constructs that can make our speech "listenable", friendlier and more enjoyable:
1. (To one client) You all have the same problem … - I noticed that you are worried about X. Let's work on this together and see how we can solve it.
2. You are not the first person to tell me about this. “This worries many of us, and this is natural. That's why…
3. People often think in vain that … - We all tend to think that …
4. What are you, a fool? Do not do this! - An interesting option. What else can you do? (the example of jumping off a cliff does not count: here a simple one will do: "Stop," No.; *%)!"
5. Leading questions from the series "And this tells us what?", "Well, now think about what this means. Well?" It is better to get rid of such a tone of narration altogether. The difference between questions of this kind and rhetorical questions is that in the questions considered in this point, one person is trying to "fish out" the only correct answer from the other - just like when we wrote essays at school and tried to guess the teacher's point of view to earn a high score.- note: this item refers to simple human communication without taking into account the peculiarities of psychotherapy sessions.
Turning arrogant communication into a search for solutions, asking the question "How can I help this person?" - even if the help consists in not helping at all, the authors of ideas do much more for listeners and readers than academic teachers.
If our goal is to put an idea in the reader's head, to infect a person with the need to do something, we need to first of all show him sincere concern. Think: how can I make it clear to him, based on the position of kindness and mutual respect? (The army knows how to give clear anti-examples: "You are all nuns and weaklings, but now I will show you what it is like to be a man!")
Let us remember that each of us is unique - and therefore, it is perfectly legitimate to consider ourselves unique. If the crossed out phrases from the series of the above caused you an unpleasant tingling sensation when they were pronounced in relation to you, and you tried to muffle this tingling sensation, this does not mean that you did something wrong. We are unique and independent. Our cases are unlike anyone else. So how can we generalize others based on one problem? We don't want to be “like everyone else,” right?
Lilia Cardenas, psycholinguist, writer, announcer, English teacher
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