Most of us have been admonished from an early age to “think before you speak.” But it turns out that speaking doesn’t work that way. Studies in psycholinguistics (Smith and Wheeldon 1999, for example) suggest that humans routinely dive into spoken sentences without a plan for how they will end. We do some basic preprocessing of the opening phrase, and perhaps some sketching around how it might end. But otherwise we’re constructing the sentence as we say it. Just notice yourself speaking at some moment today, and see what you do.
Speak by Alex Rensen
Normally, a blog post would get normative after that statement: saying you should think a whole sentence through before you say it. But that’s not how our brains work. And if they did, we’d never actually speak to each other in productive ways.
Spoken communication is constructed entirely in context and in response to a thousand variables — implicit and explicit. Leaping into a sentence before it’s fully constructed is a necessary fact of life. And when you think of it, it’s also an extraordinary act of faith — that the rest of the sentence will be waiting for you when you get to it, that you have a strong enough working knowledge of vocabulary and grammar and syntax to make it through mostly unscathed, that the person you’re speaking to will be a collaborative partner in unpacking whatever you construct.
By this metric, each of us is making a few hundred small leaps of faith each day.
This disconnect between what we’re supposed to do before speaking, and what we actually do, strikes me as relevant to the many ways we talk about strategy and planning. We’re supposed to draft a thorough plan before taking action in our individual work, or the collective work of our organization. We’re supposed to think through all contingencies, and plan for them.
But what we actually do, at our best, is think through the opening phrase, and the possible closing phrase, and dive in. So many of the managers I meet in arts organizations recognize this in their work, and feel bad about it. They should have a better plan for their day, their week, their month, their year. But they’re mostly acting in faith in response to the moments they bump into. As a result, they self-criticize continually, even as they’re diving in to do extraordinary work.
The insights of psycholinguistics tell us we can’t and won’t prepare our sentences in full before we begin them. But we can and might build our capacity to construct them on the fly. We can improve our vocabulary, enhance our focus and attention, listen more deeply, read sentences by masters to hear and feel how they flow. And, we can be open to our own voice and what it’s reaching for mid-sentence, and kindly encourage it along, forgiving it when wanders off the path.
As E.M. Forster framed it (in Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951): “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think is creation’s.”
Thank you so much for placing one of my favorite practices in this context.
When I work with arts administrators, I usually suggest banishing the phrase “I think…” from meetings, and insist that it be replaced with “We know…” In my field, which is marketing, what arts administrators think is usually pretty worthless, but a sentence that starts with “we know” will inevitably head in a more productive – direction.
If what you say is correct, Andrew, the words we choose to start sentences can have a profound effect on what follows. For me this exercise has always been an intuitive means of short-circuiting bad arts management habits, but you’ve given it a theoretical framework that suggests all sorts of interesting possibilities.
I wonder if there are other habitual sentence starters that might be managed in hopes of influencing more productive thinking/speaking.
First things first, thank you for putting this into perspective. Growing up I’d always be told to think before I speak, and often times it wasn’t that easy. I was told that thinking before you speak was the best way to have a productive conversation but being as though you flipped that notion right on its head makes me think back to all the words that went unsaid because of thinking about it too much.
In my romantic relationship, most of the time I do not think before I speak I let the words flow and it allows me to sort of “speak from the heart”. I feel that our conversations are more successful that way. When an argument comes about, it’s all emotion from things that have happened over time or time and time again. As humans, we don’t normally address something we don’t like our significant other to do the first or even second time they’ve done it depending on the circumstance. With that being said, you’ve had time to process the wrongdoing so you have a pretty solid idea of what you’re going to say when the matter is addressed. And that is the most unsuccessful portion of solving issues in a relationship, our arguments don’t have much substance until we’re literally speaking from the heart and not thinking about it.
I like the thought of not thinking before you speak as being a leap of faith. Being a person who lives by the code of not thinking before you speak, I find it interesting that you actually can be that way and not have to sensor yourself. You just kinda have to have faith in yourself to say things that are meaningful and aid a productive conversation.
I’ve never actually thought about it this way until reading this article and I plan to apply this in all of my relationships with others.