Answer: Try to make everyone you speak to feel personally addressed.
In his Vanity Fair essay, Unspoken Truths, Christopher Hitchens wrote:
To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. . .
The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.
Interesting. Hitchens was a brilliant speaker and writer. I wonder if anywhere in his writings he left instructions on how we could become better conversationalists?
Here;s a short video where he gives advice to would-be writers (and conversationalists):
About Anne Austin
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