How do you talk to someone you just met? Is it a good idea to communicate by email? How do you say no without using the word? Conversation can be difficult regardless of age or occupation. It is one of the most important things you do on a daily basis. Conversation help you advance your career and deepen your relationships. Research shows that talking is correlated with a feeling of happiness and well-being.

It takes practice and effort to be a great conversationist. It is a skill set anyone can acquire. In six lectures. There are 6 lessons for better communication. Key strategies that can dramatically improve your ability to converse with anyone will be taught. The course is delivered by Anne Curzan, an award-winning English professor at the University of Michigan.

You will be amazed at how much you can learn by examining conversations. What kind of speaker you are, the strategies you typically rely on, and the nuances of the strategies others may use are all things you will notice. You will be able to use these lessons to create more effective dialogues from the very first lecture.

Choose Your Words Wisely

Even low-stakes conversations have an underlying systematic structure that propels them along, even though an expression like shooting the breeze makes conversation sound easy and free-flowing. The course shows you how the selection of words can help you forge connections and accomplish your objectives.

Professor Curzan shows you how to negotiate difficult situations, from offering successful apologies to engaging in face threatening acts.

You will learn graceful ways.

• pointing out a mistake;
• asking someone to do something he or she doesn’t want to do;
• preparing a person for “no”;
• asking for a big favor; and
• providing information the recipient doesn’t want to hear.

When you pull your weight, conversations deepen connections. In. Conversation works. You will learn how to skillfully open and close an exchange, take turns speaking, and send people subtle signals.

Sharing the burden makes discussions feel more enjoyable. You can get a lot of conversation-facilitating devices from these lectures.

• asking your fair share of questions and follow-up questions, which requires active listening;
• providing informative (but not overly informative!) answers to other people’s questions;
• introducing new topics for discussion and picking up on the topics of others; and
• telling good stories and helping good stories along.

Talk Your Way to Success

Knowing what to say and how to say it allows for more productive, smoother interactions, whether you want to build rapport with colleagues, promote your accomplishments in an interview, give a winning presentation, ingratiate yourself with your boss, or even create a connection on a first date. Conversation works. Simple techniques for achieving all of this and more are outlined.

Professional actors demonstrate what to do. Not. striking up a conversation at a party is one example of a variety of everyday scenarios. In video formats, green-screen technology places the professor in a range of environments as she provides concrete advice for taking an uncomfortable conversation in a new direction, making polite requests, mastering the humble brag, limiting your talk time, and monitoring your use of distracting discourse markers such as

Professor Curzan gives out-the-door tips and techniques as well as debunking myths about conversation.

• how the conversational styles of men and women share much in common, despite differences in socialization;
• how you may be perceived for using direct speech or sentence fillers;
• how language-style matching quickly creates a sense of compatibility;
• how parents serve as conversational role models; and
• how e-communication has surprisingly systematic conventions.

A Guide for the Real World

Professor Curzan is a professor of English and linguistics and a member of the American Dialect Society. Using a skills-based approach that gets right to the heart of the matter, her course provides tangible, actionable methods that can be used immediately.

You will get new awareness at first. Conversation works. When you speak, it may cause you to become self-conscious, but the act of conversational noticing will soon become second nature. You will realize you have the tools to make yourself understood, put others at ease, rescue a conversation that’s gone wrong, and keep conversations from going off course in the first place.