Course mapTaking the Floor35 guided steps
Lesson 1 of 35 · Part 1 of 3

01 / The Score / Orientation

Conversation has rules

2 min listening

Ordinary talk feels spontaneous, but it is astonishingly ordered: overwhelmingly one person speaks at a time, gaps are brief, and speaker change recurs. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson showed this order comes from a shared turn-taking system every fluent speaker uses without noticing.

If conversation runs on a system, then entering it is not rudeness or luck. It is a skill of reading the system and moving with it.

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