“Be a good listener”

In 1907, an American woman named Josephine Turck Baker published a book called The Art of Conversation: 12 Golden Rules. Baker was a novelist and playwright, and the author of several books about communication (including usage guides and grammar textbooks). She was born in 1858 and lived for much of her life in Evanston, Illinois. According to the Evanston Women’s History Project, she was a strong supporter of the local arts and her home was a social hub for the Evanston community.

Published well over a century ago, The Art of Conversation has experienced an extraordinary afterlife. In 2023, it is available in multiple formats – print, online, audiobook – and can be purchased on platforms like Amazon or freely downloaded via the digital archive Project Gutenberg. While not known as a key thinker in communication studies, Baker was evidently an extraordinary communicator with the ability to write a non-fiction, instructional book (what we might even call today a “self-help book”) that endured despite the passage of time and the evolution of culture.

In her book, as the title suggests, Baker lays out 12 rules for artful conversation. Each is practical and, perhaps surprisingly given the book’s age, relatable – none more so than Rule Number 8: “Be a good listener”. Baker explains that an artful conversationalist will not “talk on”, and is skilled not just in speaking but in allowing others to speak. She insists that we “find something of interest in the conversation of others” as well as crafting our own strategies for entertaining them and holding their attention.

If you, as someone interested in communication in the 21st century, were to compile a list of 12 “rules” for artful conversation, you would probably mention listening too. It comes up time and time again when I ask my students what “good” communication involves. We know, as did Baker, that good practices of face-to-face communication involve a degree of responsiveness to others. An effective conversationalist will adjust their tone and the subject of their speech in response to subtle (or not so subtle) cues from the listener. They will also become listeners themselves and attend to the speech of their conversational partner. In a dynamic conversation, this happens in a very rapid and complex way as both speakers listen, adapt, and respond to each other. Such a process may be very conscious and intentional, as when we engage in artful and strategic conversation with a stranger at a networking event, or it may be more naturalised, as when two friends converse in a way that is pleasurable because they are so familiar with each other’s communicational patterns.

Image by Giuseppe Milo, CC BY, from Wikimedia commons

Baker’s text is replete with hidden ideas about cultural capital: it tells us much about who had access, in the early 1900s, to the knowledge and competencies that enabled artful conversation – and what sorts of power that unlocked. But we can also detect in her book an overwhelming sense that communicators should be attentive to the needs of their listeners. Baker’s Rule Number 8 speaks to the importance of the audience and the importance of knowing one’s audience. And the audience pops up again and again in her book, although she never uses the word. Many of Baker’s other rules are geared towards making the conversation more pleasurable, clear, or valuable to the listener. To be an artful conversationalist, she tells us, one must “avoid unnecessary details” so as not to bore the listener; one must not interrupt or contradict, or do all the talking; one should choose subjects of mutual interest, be tactful, and use storytelling to engage your listener (a topic we’ll investigate more fully in the next chapter).

Baker’s book may have been about conversation, specifically, but what she produced with her “12 Golden Rules” was a model of communication. Comparing Baker’s “12 rules” to Claude Shannon’s transmission model (which we explored in Chapter 1), we might notice that both models are concerned with the encoding and decoding processes of communication – that is, with what the sender does and what the receiver does. Both models include reception as a vital component. Whether we call them receivers, audiences, decoders, or listeners – or something else – these people on ‘the other end’ of our communication efforts are central to the success, effectiveness, or artfulness of the process; they matter.