David: You are listening to Dialogically Minded. Dialogical Discourse for Second Language Learners. In this program we explore the language used in public, civil, and academic discussion for the purpose of achieving various communication goals.
Good morning Jennie. How’s it going?
Jennie: Just great. I’m all ready to resume our previous topic from our last episode.
David: What? I thought we finished that.
Jennie: No, we were interrupted when we ran out of time.
David: That reminds me of that Rolling Stones song. “Out of Time.” Do you know it? It goes–
Jennie: Hey, stop trying to change the subject.
David: Okay, enough joking.
Jennie: I said that it’s continuation of our last episode because first of all, we often lose focus when–
David: This episode is going to be longer than the–
Jennie: We often lose focus when we are interrupted by another person suddenly cutting into our conversation.
David: Right. And it’s important to know how to handle these situations. Otherwise, as a non-native English speaker, some rude native English speaker will walk all over you. You have to be able to handle the interruption, perhaps respond to the interrupting person’s questions or comments, and then resume your previous talk.
Jennie: At the same time, it is also important to know how to interrupt other people. When we do this correctly, or politely, it is often called interjecting. We all know people who will completely control a conversation by talking non-stop for minutes at a time. It’s like they have learned to speak without breathing.
David: In our last episode, we gave very negative examples of speakers who cause discussion to lose focus by interrupting with unrelated talk and useless references to pop culture. However, there are times when it is appropriate to interrupt other people. Fortunately, there are useful phrases you can use to cut into such persons’ monologues without sounding rude.
In an earlier episode we heard a woman politely making an interjection. Let’s hear that again.
- Choosing Her University
[A man is trying to decide what university to send his daughter to.]
[Speaker 1]: I am having a hard time deciding which university my daughter should attend. There’s the university in my home town, but she’s not really interested in the classes there. The tuition is cheap and she has some friends who are going to study there. I suppose that would be fine. In fact, we had a long talk about it last night and–[Speaker 2]: Excuse me for interrupting, but have you really considered what your daughter wants? I’m pretty certain that if you send her to a university that she’s not interested in attending that she will soon lose all interest in her classes.
Did you catch what she said? . . . Pardon me for interrupting but . . .
[3:37]
Here are some other phrases used to make interjections:
Jennie: When you disagree with what is being said you may say:
David:Pardon/excuse me, but . . .
Excuse me for interrupting, but . . .
I’d like to say something here.
I’d like to comment on that.
Could I just jump in here?
Jennie: When you have a question you may say:
David: May I ask a question?
And when there is additional information you want to add in support of what is being said, in a one-on-one conversation, you may say:
May I add something to what you’re saying?
(In a larger group discussion) If I might add to what’s being said.
Jennie: After responding to an interruption, by, for example, answering a question, you may want to go back to your earlier line of talk. We call this resuming a previous topic. Here are some examples of phrases used to resume a previous topic:
David: In any case,
To return to what I was saying,
To get back to what I was talking about earlier,
Anyway,
Where was I,
One last point I’d like to make is . . .
As always, we’ll post a link to all these in our shownotes. But now, let’s listen to our first dialogue.
[5:29]
- Winning Lottery Ticket
[A woman is very excited to hear about her friends good luck.]
Winning Lottery Ticket!
[Speaker 1]: Wow! My friend Randy just wrote on his Facebook page that he just bought a winning lottery ticket! He won 7,000 dollars.
[Speaker 2]: That’s fantastic! Quick, call him and ask which store he bought the lottery ticket at and then go there immediately and buy as many tickets as you can. We’re sure to win something too. And here—take take this money and buy 500 dollars worth of tickets for me too! Wait, I’m going to ask Susan if—
[Speaker 1]: _______ I’m not sure there’s much sense in doing that. Just because you know Randy doesn’t in any way increase your chance of winning the lottery.
[Speaker 2]: _______. _______ since we know him he can tell us where he bought the ticket.
[Speaker 1]: _______ it highly unlikely that there are more winning tickets at that store than at any other store. In fact, there is most likely an equally low chance of buying a winning ticket, no matter what store you go to.
[Speaker 2]: Well, give me his phone number then. If you won’t call him, then I will.
Jennie: Alright listeners, phrases used for interrupting. There were two. What were they? . . . They were . . . Pardon me for interrupting and Again, I’m sorry to disagree. Okay, as for the second phrase, you’re correct if you identified that with agreeing and disagreeing. But the Again in Again, I’m sorry to disagree tells the person who is speaking that you would like to interject a comment. The again literally means that you are going to say something similar to what you said before.
David: And I hope you all recognize that in this case, the person doing the interrupting was the more intelligent of the two. He very politely interrupted this poor woman’s non-stop talk.
Jennie: I know. I thought she’d never shut up. The gentleman was trying to help her by preventing her from throwing her money away, and it was clear that she wasn’t listening.
David: I know. Sadly, you just can’t help some people. Still, that’s a good example of a case when interrupting a person is the right thing to do. Okay, next dialogue.
- The Old Anthropologist Meets The Young Earth Creationist
[8:05]
[A professor of anthropology is interrupted by a young earth creationist.]
[Speaker 1]: And so ladies and gentlemen, you can see that the recent discovery of the 3.8 million year old human bones in this region of Ethiopia is just one more piece of evidence for humans separating from chimpanzees at an earlier time than we had thought.
[Speaker 2]: Excuse me, excuse me. _______. How can you say that humans have existed for millions of years when the Bible tells us God created the world six thousand years ago. _______. For example, in the Book of Genesis, we read that–
[Speaker 1]: Sir, sir, pardon me. I think you are in the wrong building. First Methodist Church is just down the street. So, to get back to what I was saying, this new discovery clearly shows that . . .
David: Jennie, did you think the speaker who interrupted the lecturer was being polite or rude?
Jennie: Oh he was being quite rude. Even though he used the phrase, excuse me, we really can’t excuse him, because he spoke up at an inappropriate time–right in the middle of the lecture, instead of waiting for the question-and-answer period afterwards.
David: Also, it was clear that he didn’t really have a question. He only phrased his interruption as a question so that he could talk about his religious beliefs, which no one there wanted to hear . . . This is a common tactic of such people and the lecturer quickly shut him down.
Jennie: Right, and then he signposted to the audience that he was finished responding to the interruption, in this case a very foolish one, and that he was next going to resume his previous topic. Listeners, can you catch the phrase used for doing that? He said . . . So to get back to what I was saying.
David: Okay, Jennie, I’m sorry to interrupt but shall we call it a day?
Jennie: Yes, I think we had better. So until next time, think critically–
David: And speak dialogically.