Conversation Skills

There is a stranger across the room whom you’d like to speak to. Maybe that person is a possible client, lover, or friend. When you approach the stranger, what do you say? How do you justify walking across the room to hold a conversation?

In this Module, you will learn about the process of opening conversation in face-to-face contexts. You will learn about greeting rituals, the typical greeting sequence, and specific openings among unacquainted people. By the end of this module, you will be able to speak theoretically about opening conversation and apply it to your everyday life.

Greeting rituals

A greeting is a verbal mutual acknowledgment of two or more people. Verbally, greetings can expressed with words like “hello,” “hey,” and others like it. Greetings do not necessarily have to be verbal, however, they can be simple nods, waves with the hands, smiles, or winks, to name a few. Before you can even greet, you might have to engage in a pre-beginning sequence where you orient your body, proximity, and gaze towards the person, and the person possibly reciprocates to indicate their openness to greeting (Mondada, 2009). In fact, De Stefani and Mondada (2018) suggest that in public spaces, this pre-beginning sequence includes sighting, identifying, recognizing, greeting, and then conversing.

Suppose you are at the grocery store and you sight a friend who happens to be there too. There are two types of greetings: passing and open-contact (Goffman, 1982). A passing greeting is done when two individuals greet each other in circumstances that limit any further interaction beyond it. Suppose you are walking down the hallway to your next class in a hurry and you see your professor walking in the opposite direction. You might greet each other with a “hello” while still walking in opposite directions, without saying much beyond that. Passing greetings typically occur when one or both of the parties are in motion. In the grocery store example, you and your friend might be walking down the same aisle as you briefly exchange nods or “hellos” as you both continue walking in opposite directions.

Open-contact greetings occur in circumstances that invite extended conversation. Suppose you are again walking down the hallway after class and you see your professor walking in the opposite direction. Now let’s suppose that you actually had a question that you have been wanting to ask your professor. Instead of just saying “hello” and continuing to walk in the opposite direction, you actually stop and face your professor and your professor responds in kind. You then proceed to have a short conversation regarding your question. The positioning of your body to indicate that you want an extended conversation coupled with the “hello” is an example of an open-contact greeting. In the grocery example, you and your friend would stop to talk to each other for few moments after making contact and orienting yourselves to each other.

The purpose of a greeting is to acknowledge to someone that you see them as significant. When you are walking in a grocery store filled with unacquainted others, you are not expected to greet every single person who comes into your view. In fact, it might raise eyebrows if you did that. But let’s suppose that as you walked down an aisle, you saw your best friend from a distance and your best friend appears to see you. Your friend might find it to be an affront if you did not then go out of your way to say “hello.” Imagine if your best friend saw and then ignored you, how might you interpret that action? As notable sociologist, Erving Goffman (1966, p. 124) once put it, “As a general rule, acquainted persons in a social situation require a reason not to enter into a face engagement with each other, while unacquainted persons require a reason to do so.”

There are three general purposes for greetings. First, they help begin conversational activity. A typical conversation will involve some kind of acknowledgment procedure, whether it’s verbal or nonverbal. Second, greetings serve phatic purposes. Phatic communication is talk that occurs just for the sake of being social, and not for any type of information-transaction (Coupland et al., 1992). Suppose you are walking down a hall of cubicles at your workplace and that you are acquainted with your colleagues. As you pass by your colleague named Chris, you might just say, “Hello Chris” and keep walking without expecting the conversation go further than that. Why would you do that? Because the passing greeting is an acknowledgment of your acquaintanceship with Chris, it was not intended to beget any further conversation for information or other speech acts. This greeting would then serve a phatic purpose.

Lastly, greetings can serve as relational and emotional measurement tests. For example, a set of parents might be concerned that their teenager is upset about something. They ask their teenager about how their day is going. If the teen replies sullenly, they might take that to mean something is wrong. You might also use this test of “hello” to see if your friend is upset with you. If your friend does not reply or replies negatively, then you know that your friend is not happy with you.

One thing to note about greetings is that they provide ritual bracketing (Goffman, 1982). They do not have to be repeated once they have been conducted once within a specific context. For example, suppose you see a friend at a party that you are attending. You greet your friend, hold a conversation for a few moments, and then go your separate ways to mingle with others. Now that you have gone through the greeting ritual once with your friend in that context, you do not have to continue to say “hello” every instance you see that person at the party. The initial ritual covers the entire context.

Five types of openings among the unacquainted

Now that you have learned about the types of greetings, you may still wonder, “how do I begin a conversation with someone who I am unacquainted with?” While you have learned about types of greetings, there are general openings that you can use to initiate a conversation. An opening is a bid to begin a conversation on a prescribed topic.

First, there are direct openings. A direct opening is where you directly introduce yourself with your name (e.g. “Hi, my name is Jaime”). You can find direct openings being widely used at professional networking events, also at the beginning of a semester when you first meet classmates for group work. Simply open with a salutation and your name.

Second, there are situational openings which speak about something occurring in the shared context between you and the recipient. Suppose you show up to a movie theatre and notice the long line for buying tickets. As you get in line, you turn around to the unacquainted stranger behind you and say, “Quite a long line for the movies today.” That would be a situational opening as it addresses a mutually shared context. When you want to use a situational opening, look for some common object or focal point in the environment and comment on it.

Third, there are other-oriented openings, which speak to something about the person’s looks, dress, artifacts, or any other apparent features. Suppose you are standing in line at the movies and you notice that the person in front of you has an interesting tattoo on their arm. You might just ask the person after making eye contact, “What’s the story behind your tattoo?” In that case, you have inquired about the person to open the conversation. When you want to use an other-oriented opening, you can compliment, inquire, or share an observation about the person.

Fourth, there are personal disclosures. While the first three openings discussed are often formatted as questions, you can begin a conversation with a statement that discloses something about you; your beliefs, feelings, personal history, or observations about something. Suppose you are on an airplane with an unacquainted person sitting next to you. You might open the conversation by saying, “This is my first time ever on an airplane.” That statement is offer to your fellow passengers to ask about your experience so far or to disclose their own experience flying.

Finally, you can use a task-oriented opening, which asks the person to complete some kind of task. Stopping a stranger and asking them for the time or directions to the nearest pharmacy are examples of a task-oriented opening. The challenge with task-oriented openings is that once the unacquainted person has completed the task, you must then transition to another topic that is not task-related if you want to maintain the conversation. When you want to use a task-oriented opening, ask for help with completing a certain task.

Each of these openings can help kickstart a conversation by suggesting an initial topic to explore. Try each of these openings in different contexts with unacquainted people. You will be surprised how a basic opening can lead to the exploration of unexpected topics. Just be sure that your partner is clearly open to having a conversation with you.

Typical greeting sequence

Now that you have an understanding of the basic features of a greeting, we now need to understand it in the context of a sequence; specifically for beginning conversations. As you learned in the previous Module, conversations happen in sequences. In this Module, you will learn what conversation analysts have called the Typical Greeting Sequence (Sidnell, 2010). This sequence is best explained using the context of phone interactions, since such interactions more explicitly outline the essential ingredients of a greeting. However, the sequence still applies in face-to-face interactions with some minor contextualization.

The Typical Greeting Sequence is comprised of the following adjacency pairs: summons-answer, mutual recognition-identification, reciprocal state inquiries, and pursuit. To illustrate each component, below is a script based on a real phone call (Sidnell, 2010, p. 205):

“((Phone Rings))

1 Charles: Hello?

2 Yolk: Hello Charles.

3 (one second pause)

4 Yolk: This is Yolk.

5 Charles: Oh, hello Yolk!

6 Yolk: How are you haha

7 Charles: Alright haha. It’s very funny to hear from you.”

We will refer to this script throughout the next four sub-sections.

Summons-Answer

Before you can hold a conversation with someone, you must first have their attention. The process of gaining and verifying that two parties have each others’ attention is called the summons-answer sequence. Let us understand this sequence in the context of a phone call first before applying it to face-to-face interactions.

Suppose you want to call your friend to ask them for a quick favor. The first step will be dialing your friend’s phone number on your phone, which will then make their phone ring or vibrate. That ringing or vibration of your friend’s phone is an act of gaining their attention from whatever activities that they are currently focusing on. Summoning is the act of gaining another party’s attention.

Through the phone, the summons is the ringing or vibrating. In face-to-face interactions, it can be several things. It could be haptic by tapping on the person’s shoulder. It could be visual by just making eye contact with someone or standing in front of them. It could also be verbal by saying “Hey Corey!.” Summoning can be done through objects as well. Suppose your friend is in their dorm with their door closed. If you are not authorized to just “barge in” as you please, you would then knock on the door. The knocking is a form of summoning.

Of course, how you summon matters. Verbally, it might be perfectly fine with your best friend to summon them by saying “Hey” or “Yo!”, but that would probably not be received well by your professor. Haptically, it might be fine to politely tap someone on the shoulder to get their attention, but grabbing them by the arm and yanking them might be taken as a violent affront. With knocking, there is definitely a difference in reception when you lightly knock on the door, versus pound on the door with all of your might. Your friend in the room might assume it is you in the former and possibly the police in the latter.

How do you know when you have someone’s attention? They generally respond to you in some way. In the case of the phone ringing, they answer the call. Haptically, they turn around or orient their body language to you. Verbally, they can respond to you with words (e.g. they say “What?”) or by just making eye contact with you. The answer is a reception to a person’s summons.

If you are the recipient of a person’s summons, you do not necessarily have to answer. You have the choice of not answering your phone or hitting the “decline” button when you see your friend is calling. Haptically, you can ignore or resist any touching for summoning. If someone says “hello” you can pretend to not hear them or ignore the summons. If you hear a knock on your door, you can pretend to not be home and not answer it.

If you ignore a friend’s summons, then your friend might take it as an affront to the relationship. You friend might think that you are mad or upset about something. You have may have been in a situation where a friend did not reply to your text message; you were upset that your friend did not uphold their end of an adjacency pair.

When you are talking with unacquainted people, your opening line can serve as the summons. Any of the five types of openings can be said as a summons, and how your partner responds to them is the answer. Overall, the summons-answer pair is the process of gaining and establishing attention between two parties. Summons-answer avails two speakers to each other and then enables for the next segments of greeting to take place.

Mutual Recognition-Identification

Once you have gained your friend’s attention either through verbal, nonverbal, or electronic summoning, the next step is establishing speaker identities, which is done in a mutual recognition-identification sequence. In some contexts, this is done automatically due to voice or facial recognition. But in other contexts, this is a step that can become a topic of conversation on its own.

To best understand this step, suppose you get a call from an unknown number on your cell phone. Let’s also suppose that you decide to answer it because you figure that if someone is calling you, that it must be something important. After answering with a “hello” (your answer to their summons), you will probably then expect the caller to self-identify. You may even ask “who is this?” Before you go any further into the conversation, you will want to know the exactly you are speaking to.

If the speaker says, “This is Chris, your landlord.” Then you now know how the caller identifies. But you still might not know who the caller is; perhaps you do not recall having a landlord named “Chris.” In that case, you may inquire further about Chris’s identity; you might ask how he knows you, received your number, etc. But if you do recognize Chris as your landlord, then the mutual recognition-identification is halfway complete.

The other half lies in Chris ensuring that he recognizes you. Suppose Chris says, “This is Chris, your landlord, am I speaking to Jessica?” If you are not Jessica, then you will have to clarify that and tell Chris that he has the wrong number or recipient. Even if you recognize Chris, Chris does not recognize you as the intended recipient of the call (even if he does know you personally), so he will probably then end the conversation right then. If you are indeed the intended caller, then the mutual recognition-identification step is complete.

In face-to-face settings, mutual recognition-identification can happen automatically. If your best friend gains your attention by saying “hey,” then you should automatically recognize your friend by their face and voice. And your friend should have already recognized you since they addressed you first. A possible scenario where this might not happen is if your friend tapped someone on the shoulder thinking it was you, but then the person turns around and it is not.

But let’s say that you are talking to a stranger for the first time. After saying “hello,” you would probably introduce yourself with your name and a handshake. There can also be times when someone recognizes you, but you do not recognize them. The person might begin speaking to you like as if you are already acquainted, while you have trouble recalling ever meeting that person. This would be another case where there is asymmetry in recognition.

In any case, mutual recognition is an important step. The summons-answer sequence avails the speakers to each other, the mutual recognition-identification step identifies them. In some contexts, this step can be skipped. When boarding a plane, the flight attendant might just issue a command to you without self-identifying (although you will recognize the attendant’s status by the uniform), or a stranger might ask you scoot your bag under the seat as the they squeeze into the middle seat.

In the sample phone conversation above, you can see that there was an issue with mutual recognition. When Yolk says, “Hello Charles,” (line 2) there is no immediate reply from Charles indicating his recognition of Yolk by his voice (line 3). So then Yolk self-identifies (line 4), and then Charles recognizes him (line 5). You can notice the laughter afterward which is probably a result of the awkwardness of asymmetrical recognition.

Reciprocal State Inquiries

Once the speakers have availed and recognized each other, often there is third step where they inquire about each others’ well-being, which are called reciprocal state inquiries. Reciprocal state inquiries can include phrases like “how are you doing?”, “how’s your day going?,” and others (Pillet-Shore, 2018). They do not always occur in a typical greeting sequence and can be skipped.

Reciprocal state inquiries generally fall into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. A positive example would be answering an inquiry with some sort of positive status. If someone asks, “How you are doing?” and you answer with “good,” “great,” or something along those lines then that would be a positive example. A negative example would be answering the question with something like “not well,” “hurt,” etc. A neutral example would be answering with some like “ok” or “fine.”

One note about reciprocal state inquiries is the emphasis on preference for agreement, or in this case, the preference for the positive. If you answer “how are you?” with a positive statement like “great!,” then your fellow interlocutor can continue onto business or another topic. See an example below:

A: How are you doing today?

B: I’m great, how are you?

A: I’m great. I was wondering if you could work my shift on Saturday?

Notice how the inquiries serve more or less as a formality since there is no topicalization of the inquiry. A does not ask B why they are doing great nor turns it into any topic of conversation. Instead, B goes straight into business about working a Saturday shift. It is possible to do this with positive inquiries.

When you report that you are doing well, I am not expected as an interlocutor to ask “why?”

Now let’s suppose the conversation between A and B went like this:

A: How are you doing today?

B: Not too well, actually...

A: Oh ok. I was wondering if you could work my shift on Saturday?

Reading this, you might think A was insensitive to B’s status. In this case, the reciprocal state inquiry was a negative response; B was not doing too well. In these cases, a negative response requires an account. An account is an explanation for why the unexpected or normal did not happen in the course of a conversation. In western culture, we expect people to be well. If they are not well, then we must inquire why. So here is what a person might do in this case:

A: How are you doing today?

B: Not too well, actually...

A: Oh what happened?

B: My mom is in the hospital…

Here, A is seen as being more sensitive to B’s plight by asking about it. Now A still might have the intention of eventually asking B to cover the Saturday shift, but that business will be delayed until B’s negative status has been adequately acknowledged. Hence, there is a preference for positivity because it does not require an account to be addressed, and thus allows the conversation to move forward to business more quickly.

Reciprocal state inquiries do not always occur in a typical greeting sequence. They can be skipped in task-oriented communication or when such inquiries have already been expressed at a previous time. In the sample phone conversation, you see on line 6 how Yolk asks “How are you?” and Charles reciprocates with an answer and the same question on line 7.

Pursuit

The last component of the typical greeting sequence is pursuit. Pursuit is the addressing of the reason for the conversation. If the conversation is task-oriented, then pursuit would be the task. In a phone call from a salesperson, pursuit might be their sales pitch for the product. In a doctor’s office visit, pursuit might be the presentation of a medical inquiry by the patient. Pursuit also encompasses the practice of alignment, where participants seek to jointly construct each other’s identities and accomplish each others’ relevant goals in the particular interaction (Kidwell, 2018). We pursue based on how we established each other’s identities earlier in the conversation through our summons-answer, mutual recognition-identification, and reciprocal state inquiries.

If you ever receive a call from a salesperson, they do not begin the call with “Do you want to buy our product?” Instead, they begin by saying “hello,” introducing themselves, and perhaps asking how you are doing. Once you go through that sequence, then they state the reason for their call.

What about non-task-oriented interactions? You may have a best friend or family member whom you talk to regularly on the phone or via video chat of some kind. There may not be some kind of business associated with these conversations, these may just be phatic conversations. In that case, pursuit can be extended conversation about reciprocal state inquiries. Perhaps you start the conversation by asking your friend how their day went, and that leads to a story about what happened at the mall, which leads to another topic about what happened at school, etc. You will learn more about topic elicitation the next Module, which will explain how conversations evolve after the typical greeting sequence.

Conclusion

The typical greeting sequence can be seen as LEGO™ building blocks. While some conversations feature all four components, there are contexts where skipping one or several of them is justifiable. Remember that the five types of openings can also be incorporated into the sequence when talking with unacquainted partners.

How you begin a conversation is important. It establishes your identity as the speaker and how the conversation will proceed. In the next module, you will learn how to have deeper and more involved conversations by learning eliciting techniques.

Activity 1: Opening Sequence Practice

Find a picture of someone in a social context and identify three different openings that you could use to initiate conversation with that person.

Activity 2: Mini-Networking Event

Have students get out of their chairs and stand up. Have them pretend that this is a networking event, where the goal is to mingle with people they do not know. Give them 5 minutes to have this networking event and ask them recall how they greeted each person. What kinds of openings did they use? How did the typical greeting sequence apply or not apply?

Coupland, J., Coupland, N., & Robinson, J. D. (1992). “How are you?”: Negotiating phatic communion. Language in Society, 21(2), 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500015268

De Stefani, E., & Mondada, L. (2018). Encounters in public space: How acquainted versus unacquainted persons establish social and spatial arrangements. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(3), 248–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1485230

Goffman, E. (1966). Behavior in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press.

Goffman, E. (1982). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. Pantheon.

Kidwell, M. (2018). Early alignment in police traffic stops. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(3), 292–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1485232

Mondada, L. (2009). Emergent focused interactions in public places: A systematic analysis of the multimodal achievement of a common interactional space. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(10), 1977–1997. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.019

Pillet-Shore, D. (2018). Arriving: Expanding the personal state sequence. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(3), 232–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1485225

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.

Account: An explanation for why the unexpected or normal did not happen in the course of a conversation

Greeting: A verbal mutual acknowledgment of two or more people.

Opening: A bid to begin a conversation on a prescribed topic.

Open-contact greetings: Greetings that occur in circumstances that invite extended conversation.

Passing greeting: When two individuals greet each other in circumstances that limit any further interaction beyond it.

Phatic Communication: Talk that occurs just for the sake of being social, and not for any type of information-transaction

Pre-beginning Sequence: The nonverbal process of two people orienting themselves to greet each other.

Summoning: The act of gaining another party’s attention.

Typical Greeting Sequence: The sequence by which parties open a conversation generally on the phone and in face-to-face encounters with some recontextualization.

1. How to make conversation with anyone

Watch this talk about how to make conversation with anyone. How do the principles taught in this Module apply or not? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4Zu5ZZAG7I

2. Talk to Strangers

Watch this Ted Talk about why you should talk to strangers. How does this compare with what we are taught about “stranger danger?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Loq-yNWI