Silence as a Skill
Read about the disciplined use of silence in conversation and practise advanced discourse markers, hedging, and cohesive devices.
Read the Text
It is sometimes argued that the most underrated communicative skill is the one that requires no words at all. One could be forgiven for assuming, given the cultural premium placed on articulacy, that any silence in conversation reflects awkwardness or evasion. In reality, however, the skilled use of silence is not the absence of communication but a particularly demanding form of it, a kind of deliberate withholding that leaves room for thought, both one’s own and that of one’s interlocutor.
It is worth noting at the outset that silence is not a single thing. There is, on the one hand, the silence that follows a difficult question, the one that signals the responder is choosing words rather than reaching for them automatically. On the other hand, there is the silence imposed on a conversation that is no longer worth having, an exit so quiet that, arguably, it is more graceful than any departing remark. Between these two extremes lie countless gradations: the pause that lets a colleague finish their unspoken sentence, the deliberate beat after praise to prevent its dilution, the hush that allows grief to be heard without being managed.
It might be supposed that mastery of silence is a personality trait, the territory of the naturally reserved. The evidence, insofar as one can speak of evidence in such matters, suggests otherwise. Most, if not all, practitioners of disciplined silence describe it as a learned skill, often acquired against their natural inclination. The lawyer who pauses three full seconds before answering a journalist’s question, the manager who lets a difficult silence sit until the team supplies its own answer, the teacher who waits for the slower hand to rise; these are not naturally taciturn people. More often than not, they are former over-talkers who have noticed, sometimes painfully, that their words were costing them.
That said, silence has limits, and a great deal of misuse passes itself off as restraint. The withholding of one’s view when speaking is the right thing to do, for instance, is not silence as a skill but silence as cowardice. Silences that punish, manipulate, or shame belong to a different category altogether and should be named for what they are. In the same vein, the practised silence of the powerful is not always wisdom; sometimes it is simply the privilege of not having to explain oneself.
On balance, what distinguishes the skilful silence is that it makes the other person more articulate, not less. A pause that invites speech is generative; a pause that suppresses it is coercive. The competent communicator can tell the two apart in the moment, and, crucially, adjusts. It is, in the end, less a matter of saying nothing than of choosing precisely when nothing is what most needs to be said.
Questions
Why, according to the writer, is silence so often misjudged?