COPYRIGHT

Chart from THE ORIGINS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, Fourth Edition by Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, copyright © 1993 by Harcourt Inc., reproduced by permission of the publisher.

POWER TALK. Copyright © 2001 by Sarah Myers McGinty, Ph.D. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books.

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2135-3

First eBook Edition: February 2001

To the boys on the team and the girl who coached

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When readers ask writers, “Is this book about you?,” the answer has to be “Yes!” While the exact relationship between the written product and the author remains inscrutable—even to the writer herself—everything in this book connects to what I’ve seen and thought, done and imagined, heard and listened for. Done properly, the naming of resources would be an impossible task.

Here, then, it must be done improperly. Acknowledging the inevitable omissions, I thank for their immediate and direct help my able, patient, and enthusiastic editor Rob McMahon, as well as Ethan Kline, Rafe Sagalyn, Geoff Colvin, and Justin Martin. The Expository Writing Program and the Teacher Education Program at Harvard, as well as the staff at Lamont and Baker libraries, have been important in this work. My research assistant, Debra Grossman, kept me on track, and I received invaluable research support from Pat Bellanca, Sarah N. McGinty, John E. McGinty, Ann Holby, and Christopher Conroy. Other important contributors were Charlotte Sibley, Patti Hunt Dirlam, Karen Kemby, Sharon Kellogg, Herminia lbarra, Robin Wagner, Amy Kautzman, Ross Wood, Steve Sayers, Judith Heller, Judy Bidwell, Bill Crowley, Andy Walter, Melinda McGinty, Karen Stevenson, Rhonda Davis Smith, Phil Driscoll, Sig Heller, Curtis Hartman, Sam Chwat, Nancy Boardman, Dan Hoffman, Caroline O’Neill, Mike and Claudia Thorn-burgh, sales personnel at Creative Office Pavilion, Michael Schu, Joe Fennewald, and the coxes and oarsmen of the Harvard crew. The inspiration of fellow scholars, especially Virginia Valian, cannot pass without mention.

A NOTE ABOUT NOTES

Knowledge does not stand alone. All ideas and insights develop within the context of the work of other researchers, thinkers, and writers. This book is no exception, and while it is not meant to be an academic textbook, it nonetheless draws on and references the work of other scholars. I have followed the convention of trade books and do not footnote within the text; I direct you to the Notes at the end, where my sources are cited. You will find a Bibliography there as well, offering direction for follow-up reading where a topic or idea interests you.

INTRODUCTION

So how are things at work?

•  Does your boss overlook your contributions? Does your team ignore your ideas? Do your colleagues forget your suggestions?

•  Do you struggle to create consensus in your department?

•  Are you headed for a new company or a new location?

•  Are the skills you need for the next position different from those you mastered in entry-level work?

•  Are you on the fast track with a plan or stalled on the shoulder without a clue?

If your answer is yes to any (or many) of these questions, this book was written for you. Work is about performance. But performance—what you’ve done, where you’ve succeeded, and who knows about it—depends on your ability to communicate. How can I make the most of the time I have to talk? How can I persuade others to follow my plan? How can I be sure my ideas are remembered as mine? How can I create authority? How can I inspire collaboration? Speech and language choices figure into all these situations, and they are as important to the solutions as good ideas or an impressive title. Yes, work is about performance, but recognition and promotion require good communication skills.

Good communication skills required. Every job posting lists good communication skills as a necessary qualification. But what are good communication skills? A loud voice? An extensive vocabulary? The power to persuade? The stylistic flair of a poet? We often assume communication skills aren’t much more than the ability to write a clear memo or pull together an efficient agenda. But spoken language, rather than writing, is at the heart of most business communication. Talk is how we prefer to do business. We feel inefficient and frustrated when the workday is full of messaging options, voice mail, telephone tag, and the black hole of holding. We want to talk to people directly, explain ourselves, practice our own brand of chatter and charm. While memos, e-mails, reports, and letters all convey important information, the relationships we create and the impressions we convey are built on what we say and how we say it.

Specialists find that presentation speakers have about thirty seconds to capture the attention of an audience. Isn’t that true every time we open our mouths? As the most constant way we interact with each other, speech conveys our ideas, intelligence, and values. But it also conveys our assurance, confidence, and leadership. These factors, as well as the work we do, get us hired, adopted as a protégé, or promoted. Appearance may be the first thing people notice, but initial impressions are quickly undercut (or overcome) by words. Speech choices create power and influence.

Good communication skill, as defined in this book, is an understanding of how situation shapes speech and how speech shapes situation. It has nothing to do with proper grammar, accents, vocabulary lessons, or the gerund. Rather, the agenda here is subversive: a look behind the scenes, a chance to examine the speech conventions of our world—the sociology of language—as a means to understanding, competence, and control. Such a behind-the-scenes view complicates understanding, but it also creates intentional (and thus more effective) speech choices. Think of the photocopying machine in the back office. You know how to make copies. But if you know something more—how it works, how to change the toner, how to clear a jam—you have real control of the tool. A higher level of understanding puts you ahead of the guy who only knows how to hit the print button. Understanding speech styles and the forces that affect those styles is an advantage in the workplace far beyond what you get from fixing a back office machine. It can give you thirty seconds more airtime in a meeting, help you stave off the assaults others make on your speech moments, build your authority, and enhance your credibility and impact.

Speech awareness even supports the transition to a new position or to a new employer. You can sound like a divisional head, a VP, a manager, or a supervisor while you’re learning to be one; language allows you to borrow authority from words while expertise and experience accumulate. Student teachers, for example, begin September with a few stock phrases and spend the rest of the year learning to teach. They manage with “All right, people, let’s settle down” and “This is due tomorrow” as they develop skills, strategies, and a personal style of teaching. Emily was a particular favorite. Her background was in improvisational theater. She had a special advantage because she knew, at least to begin with, it was going to be a bit of an act, a matter of sounding right until she learned the job!

“Hold on!” you say. “I’ve been talking all my life. I don’t need anyone to show me how to do this. At the age of two, I set off with a firm command of ‘Da-da’ and the rest is history!”

Actually, that’s part of the problem. Since we all began talking without formal instruction, very little of our education focused on speech and language study. There was some sentence diagramming in seventh grade and vocabulary drilling in eleventh. When you joined your firm, you learned industry buzzwords like ebitda, wacc, or double nickels. You unconsciously adopted the shorthand language for the product line and the client roster. But the sociology of language—how social forces and speech patterns interact—wasn’t part of either your school curriculum or your corporate training program.

Several other forces make it easy to overlook this discipline and the ways that social and situational forces affect conversation and communication. One is the fact that language learning is largely unconscious. It hardly seems necessary to offer instruction. As George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle declares in estimating the price of lessons from speech specialist Henry Higgins: “You wouldn’t have the face to ask me the same for teaching me my own language as you would for French; so I won’t give more than a shilling.” Our own facility with language, the competence we achieved before we even went to school, makes speech instruction seem no more necessary than breathing lessons.

And precisely because you have been talking all your life, you probably don’t know what you really sound like or how you choose the words you use. My student Adam, a life-long resident of Long Island, confessed to me that he was in high school before he realized that many people pronounced the nearby airport, La Guardia, with an “r” sound in the middle. For fifteen years, he had never consciously heard anyone say anything but “Lagwadia” and he assumed that somehow this word had a silent r in the middle of it. In college, he was surprised that his friends teased him about his pronunciation: “I felt like this was my airport—I lived ten minutes from the runways—and they were telling me how to pronounce it?!” What we do know about speech, and especially about our own speech, was learned unsystematically. Our own daily familiarity with our speech choices inhibits analysis. We often hear ourselves clearly only through the ears of someone else …and we can be surprised by what they hear.

To complicate matters, language and identity are strongly connected. The sound of our speech is part of how we know who we are. A sub, a hero, or a grinder? A bucket or a pail? A faucet or a spigot? Catty-corner, caddy-corner, or caddy-wumpus? Whatever you’ve grown up saying seems “right.” The transplanted speaker who suppresses her “Lagwadia” or “y’all” or “thee-ay-ter” finds it all comes back on the phone to Dad or at Grandma’s dinner table. Words tell us when we’re home.

We are, in part, then, what we say. We draw identity from our speech habits. The power of the Québécois in Canada, the controversy over the recognition of Black Vernacular English in Oakland, California, the resistance of the Académie to Americanisms in French, prove that language and identity are intertwined in profound and complicated ways. Our speech habits may only occasionally be the object of direct study or awareness, but when they are held up to the light, tempers flare, dictionaries are hauled out, and most of us vow that our beloved pronunciation is the only one, our favorite phrase the most apt, our name for a thing the name God intended. Thus, because we are first unconscious of our own ways of saying things—remember the first time you heard your voice played back on a tape recorder?—and next because we tend to cling to and defend our words and ways, the effort to acquire more objective ears is difficult. But an understanding of the forces that shape speech choices and the impact of those choices is an essential communication skill. This understanding makes the unconscious conscious, the accidental intentional. It offers flexibility and control. And it underlies power and influence.

The good news is that this isn’t going to be like learning statistics or passing the CFA or mastering Dutch. Remember the “Da-da” days. You were a first-rate talker at four. And since then, you’ve nimbly adapted to the expanded vocabulary of school and work, the constant changes of language convention. Are you saying “Whazzup?” or “So there you go” or “It’s all about …”? Have you noticed that “Do me a favor” now precedes a reprimand rather than a request? Do you have some “concerns” about all this? (We’re delivering our criticisms as “concerns” these days.) Are we “on the same page”? We need to be. And by the way, watch out for that word “need.” It’s started to mean “should.”

You: “What’s the deadline for the Zimmerman report?”

Your boss: “You need to get that to me by Friday.”

It looks like a late night for you on Thursday. But you don’t need to get some annoying report done by Friday. Your boss just made her need into yours! It’s amazing how easily and how unconsciously we adapt to language’s change and vitality.

So read on with confidence. Power Talk is the advanced course for speakers looking for more control of their words and their impact. Language’s sneaky habit of constant change is already a part of your life; what lies before you has nothing to do with diagramming sentences. In fact, the organized study of the intersections of speech and social convention is more like psychology or sociology than high school grammar. When we dabble in sociolinguistics, when we raise to the level of consciousness important judgments and strategies in our speech exchanges, we sort out the influence of situation on speech. And we observe how language contributes to that situation. Knowing which words sound like power, both the direct power of authority and the indirect power of influence, is more useful than spelling skills or PowerPoint. Such knowledge lets you showcase your ideas and take your performance public.

Of course, language doesn’t create reality. Excellent work— top sales figures, long hours, innovative programs, new accounts—comes first. But excellent work is uncovered in conversations, broadcast in phone calls, hyped in meetings, and shared through spoken communication. All day long, we create power and credibility with our performance, with work and words. Understanding how language shapes situation gives you greater control of the situation. It provides a workbox of useful tools and a way to think about language choices that can change minds and increase options. An informed and thorough knowledge of language, free from subjectivity and false ideas about correctness or difference, can help you speak with wiser intention, listen with greater insight, and judge others with more equity. If you will cross-examine your own speech style, the world you work in, and the situations you struggle with, you can strengthen your own position and make good use of your successes (and failures). Some of these successes and failures will hinge on components of communication and some won’t. But study of the sociology of speech will multiply your communication options and give you access to power and influence that might otherwise elude you. This knowledge is true power.

Herewith, then, a user’s guide to language. Predicated on the belief that language is power and that knowledge of language is a political tool, this book will take a skill you already have— speech—and show you how to make the most of it. With an understanding of the relationship between power and language, you can accurately analyze speech situations, gain control over the impression you create, convey the right message, and accomplish your goals. This book will show you how to use your knowledge of language to create power and influence.