The Rise of Overconfidence

Have you ever been listening to someone blab on about something you know nothing about, yet you still try to contribute to the conversation? Welcome to ...

80 Percent of Our Words Are Shared with Five People

According to a study published in Scientific American, we each speak an average of 16,000 words per day. We like to imagine ourselves conversing with ...

Taco Bell's Tricky Language

Dan Jurafsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford, revealed in a recent interview some interesting ways that Taco Bell uses language in their menus: ...

Talking Is Easy, Listening Is Hard Work

Take this simple test: After your next long conversation with someone, estimate what percentage of it you spent talking. Be honest. No, you're already ...

Expert Says Online Communication Has Replaced Conversations

Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T. and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, has spent years studying ...

Young Boy Feels the Pain of His Father's Emotional Absence

Steve Smith writes in “The Jesus Life”:

One of the deepest memories I have of my father is when we would have breakfast together. We'd ...

Potato Chips and a Lesson on Speaking with Grace

Texts:Colossians 4:6 or passages that speak of evangelism or reaching out to others

Principle: Speaking to others with grace has great power

Objects: A ...

Playing "What If?"

My husband and I like to play "what if?" We sit and toss out ideas: What if we moved out of state? What if we enclosed our porch? What if we ...

Throwing the Bucket

Charles Haddon Spurgeon said that preaching is like throwing a bucket of water at a row of bottles. Some of the water goes in some of the bottles. But ...

What Is Conversation?

When men and women refer to "conversation," they might not be talking about the same thing at all, observes communication theorist Deborah Tannen: ...