Speak the Best Business English!
Words – are you starved of them?
Are we losing the knack of good conversation? Is conversation a lost art?
If so, how can we re-claim it? Do you ever think about the hundreds of words you use every day? If you stop to think bout it, you’ll realise that The Word is King. Without words it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for you to express even your simplest thought. Think about how many times a day you ask someone for something. It could be as simple as ‘Pass me that book, will you?’ or as complex as asking someone to explain a new piece of software. Most words paint pictures in your mind so, all through your life, you’re painting ‘mind pictures’ with the spoken or written word.
Painting a word picture
Take a simple sentence like: ‘A woman ran towards her home.’ Straight away you have, in your mind’s eye, a picture of a woman (not a man or a child) running (not walking) towards a house (not any old house, but the house that is her home). If you add another word here and there, you can expand the picture hugely:
‘A beautiful woman ran towards her home, as a big white dog on a lead pulled her along the road, to where the sound of music was coming from a mass of people dancing in her garden.’ You see, just by adding some descriptive words, you have the beginning of a whole story.
The world of grunts
Sadly, many parents find that their children feel ‘cool’ if they converse with them in a series of indecipherable grunts. Also, teachers report a decline in their pupils’ ability to express themselves in spoken or written language. Perhaps the art of speech is becoming a lost art. The media, and in particular, the controllers of our television watching, must be held accountable for much of this loss.
What happened to conversation?
Education begins at home. We can no longer carry out a civilised conversation because we’re too busy watching the ‘moving wallpaper’ of almost non-stop television. Yet, the art of conversation is one of our greatest attributes. Our ability to communicate with one another has developed over hundreds of thousands of years. We started with a series of grunts and now have an astonishingly sophisticated system of sounds, symbolising our every hope, wish and desire. However, if the current trend continues, and we come to regard life as a spectator sport, this would be a great tragedy. We would have come from primitive grunts to eloquent expressive language and then back to primitive grunts again. So, switch off the television and have a real conversation!
You can learn to do it with ease.
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