I’m so glad that you want to get together and try out our new style of conversation. Yay! Maybe at Sukkot, in October, you can come over and have tea in our Sukkah. That would be great.

I have always wondered how someone who is as prolific reader as I have always been, could not seem to spell . I wonder if some people do not see individual letters but the over all shape of words and then figure out what the shape means based on context and process of elimination …..ie…the word for “chair” creates a chair picture in my head . I know that I have a tendency to leave vowels out both reading and spelling and can seldom figure out which vowel goes in a word .

I seldom have problems actually understanding individual speakers as long as there is no back ground noises and they are speaking in concrete information but it is very tiring and I avoid it as much as possible . An hour a day of human iteration is more then enough for me .

and thank “geeks” for spell check or I wouldn’t even be able to communicate with written language .

1) Speak slowly and use a lot of pauses. A lot of people will adjust their conversational strategy to more closely resemble their conversational partner’s, even in everyday conversation. I think this is automatic for a lot of people.

2) Set the stage to indicate a slower conversation, if you can – e.g., “would you like to go into the living room and sit down and relax and chat over a cup of tea?” or “I’m actually kind of tired and could do with a relaxed conversation. Maybe we could go out to the back porch and sit and enjoy the weather?” “Would you like to maybe take a relaxed walk outside?” (If you have somewhere with a scenic view, like a nice backyard, that can encourage breaks between conversation for contemplation.)

3) If you’re going to go to a social event, and this is something the attendees would go for, try seeding the activities ahead of time with ones that are incompatible with lots of conversation. If there’s a game that you enjoy, you or someone else might mention to the host ahead of time that you were thinking of bring a particular game, and ask if they have a room that you could set it up in. The drawback to this is that if people aren’t interested in playing it, it doesn’t work very well. If you can get someone with more social connections to do it they may have more success.

4) I gravitate to the kitchen at parties and offer to help. There are usually fewer people there, and more tasks to do, meaning less conversation, and what there is is more predictable and usually involves finding or arranging or cleaning things. Sometimes people don’t want to burden their guests so they say they’ve got it under control, and a way to sneak in to help is spontaneously clearing up unused unattended plates/silverware/cups and bringing them into the kitchen. (As long as they’re really unattended.)

5) Phone calls (works best with cell phones): “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble making out what you’re saying because of background noise/a bad connection. Could you go back and slow down and speak a little clearer?”

I’d love to read about your observations of who can slow down and who cannot. Needless to say, I avoid TV and movie buffs if I can!