inpromissum

Self-awareness? From Nick? ;) Here's the problem with "moving things along" (a trait which I too tend to exhibit): it is an extremely arrogant thing to do. It says to the people around you, "There is no subtlety to your point."

In general, you (and I) surround yourself with fairly intelligent people. It is possible that their points are more complex than the one sentence introductions. By cutting them off you never get to the meat of the argument. I’ve been in conversations with people who finish my thoughts. About half of the time I give up. It’s just not worth it. Ironically, it often leads me to think that the person couldn’t grasp the subtlety.

I’m not sure any of that made sense. I need my coffee.

I noticed that about you when you met my parents. :) It's a good thing you're so cute or my mom might have taken offense. I think it helps, and you may do this already, if you actually listen to what the person is saying more closely instead of just trying to get the gist. Kind of like in written English, if you are paying attention to sentence structure you can tell when there must be more to come or when the comment is logically finished. For instance, if someones is agreeing with a point you made and offering a story they might say "Oh yeah, that happened to me at work as well. My boss was all wound up about the pay cuts . . ." (this is where they get cut off). There must be more to the story than just a reiteration of what you were suggesting the first time around, right? There must be some reason they are telling the story - a personal twist or a funny response to the situation.

Si?

Part of the problem with trying to figure out where sentences logically end is that it's pretty easy for English to have lots of potential ending points * that don't end up being ending points * because you can drag out sentences as long as you want *, especially if you want to bring commas into things.

--Nick

Excuses, excuses.

I'm not saying I don't want to change anything or that I don't think it's a problem - I wouldn't have written something in that case. Just stating what some of the difficulties are. :)

--Nick

I think little social foibles like this are what give us our adorable geek sheen. I find that when I switch social groups (from all my geeky CS friends or handing out at Gates) to the MS&E crowd, I feel like a social neanderthal for a good while -- missing all sorts of subtle cues, saying really dorky things. Whee! And then when I hang in my office too much before heading over to Gates, I suddenly feel like everyone's being really rude.

Although for me it's less interruption and just knowing what to say.

I was so drawn to the "adorable geek sheen", and then I didn't understand the rest. Please explain MS&E and handing (or hanging) our at Gates. I don't speak MS. :)

She's speaking Stanford. ;) Gates is the CS building there.

MS&E = Management Science & Engineering, which used to be called Industrial Engineering. Clearly, Industrial Engineering doesn't have an impressive enough acronym, so the Stanford academic board had to change that straightaway.

Anyway, I agree with Jan that it's definitely a geek thing, though I hesitate to call it "adorable". :) I find that here at work, there are a lot of people who really like to get their opinions heard. After a while, I just start tuning them out.

We CS people should have a required semester at Finishing School before we're handed our degrees.

I think Shasha and Steve covered all the Stanford-speak. :)

My advisor jokes that we should make all the engineers take Basic Human Communication 101 before they're allowed to graduate.

LOL. Instead of an HCI class he's recommending an HHI class? ;)

Hope this conversation isn't dead in the water but I wanted a little advice. Recently, I was accused of always butting in. However, my feeling is the person never shuts up long enough for me to express my point of view and also interrupts. When we are one on one or with out boyfriends it is no problem because she needs me to hold up the other end of the conversation(both our men are introverted/shy). The problem seems to be when we have a third participant in the conversations. Does anyone know how I could approach this problem without a large confrontation? I do accept that I probably do interrupt, but I generally try to follow the natural rules and if someone was saying something, I remember waht it was and say I am sorry, you were saying...(exactly where they left off) Is that not really acceptable?