You know, hedging my communication can be, well, prosocial?

On talking more assertively, leaving room for nuance, and deeply enjoying "Wordslut" by Amanda Montell

First drafted on January 30th.

A college friend and I have long disagreed about the best way to communicate. (Sean, who is close with both of us, often finds himself in the middle of our contention. The fact that his two favorite people have such vastly different personalities—not to mention ways of verbally expressing those personalities—still amazes me a little.)

Brett believes the right way to talk is simply, honestly, and bluntly. I believe he’s too blunt. If I’m not sure of something? I will not speak with authority about it. I will add words like “possibly” and “maybe” and “usually”. I will drop in “I mean” and “just” and “of course, there could be exceptions”.

To Brett, that sounds weak and timid: I dilute my argument and make myself harder to take seriously. I feel the same about his preferred conversational style: There’s no way every claim he makes is true and backed by data (or even wholly believed himself), so isn’t acting otherwise what’s actually weak? Isn’t asserting every outlandish sentence as Obviously True diluting his argument? (You can see why we have difficulty talking to each other about anything more involved than cute dogs and good television shows.)

Things got pretty heated when Sean and I visited him in Denver last November. I’m not proud to admit that I ended our shitshow of a daylight saving time conversation by retreating to the bathroom when I did not, in fact, have to pee. I just needed to take a deep breath (and cry a lil’) without anyone watching.

Almost three months later, in the middle of my morning reading, I feel differently. “I’m ready for Brett to argue with me about my communication style again!” I shout to Sean. “I. Am. So. Ready!”

I just wrapped up the third chapter (called “Mm-hmm, Girl, You’re Right: How Women Talk to Each Other When Dudes Aren’t Around”) of Amanda Montell’s 2019 Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. She begins my favorite section on page 90: “[Linguist Jennifer] Coates busts a slew of commonly believed myths about a verbal tactic called hedging. When linguists talk about hedges, they’re referring to “filler” phrases like just, you know, well, so, I mean, and I feel like.”

As I flew through the passages, I ranted with increasing speed, yelling to Sean while he attempted to work on his engineering diagrams. (It is very fun to be married to me, especially living in a tiny van. My enthusiasm is contagious and never ill-timed.) Here’s the written version of where my head is at.

First, the idea that women communicate differently than men is an old one. Often the implication is that “different” is worse: We’re less clear, less thoughtful, or even less motivated than our masculine counterparts. And while English-speaking society has made a lot of progress toward gender equality, women are still told to talk like guys.

Robin Lakoff, scholar at UC Berkeley, encouraged women to avoid hedging their speech: “[Her] issue with women succumbing to this expectation was that inserting too many justs or you knows in order to come off as sweet and self-doubting won’t help women’s overall station in society; instead, it will reinforce the stereotype that women are naturally docile and insecure. As a result, they should stop themselves from using these phrases at every turn,” summarizes Montell. “If you’re a woman, you might have heard a teacher or parent offer similar criticisms at some point in an attempt to help you sound more “authoritative” and “self-confident” for a job interview or presentation,” she continues before offering reasons we might not actually need to listen to that advice. (Top ones: Hedging can serve an important purpose in communication—and why should we assume the default male speech style, anyway? More on that later.)

I audibly cheered while reading that passage. I felt seen. No matter how much I listened to messages from college professors and work mentors that I should strike qualifiers from my emails, it’s never felt natural to communicate that assertively. Still, I made attempts, at least in my professional life—only last week I purposefully edited “just” out of an email to a client. (Except this client and I have a pretty casual relationship. She would not have blinked twice at “just”—I didn’t need to make the change. It was muscle memory from years in the business school.)

I’ve experienced “be more assertive” feedback on the internet, too. My natural communication style—I usually call it “soft”—has built many genuine connections. It’s also caused issues. I’ve been told to be less timid. I’ve been accused of perpetuating the idea that women must be submissive and “nice” in conversation. Once, a middle-aged male dog trainer dismissed my response to his unsolicited message (without ever having met us, he reached out to say Scout looked “anxious” in all our photos—I told him it didn’t feel like the start of a good-faith discussion) by writing “communication doesn’t have to be saccharine to be acceptable”.

At times I’ve worried these voices have a point. Am I perpetuating unreasonable expectations of women? (I certainly can be too sensitive—the people who love me best will readily say so.) But I’ve never been able, even after intentional reading and writing and real-time editing, to feel good about communicating bluntly. I can go halfway, maybe. My comfort varies context to context—but I always trip over a lack of nuance eventually.

So my greatest validation came on page 91 of Montell’s sociolinguistics book. “People confuse women's use of certain softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty”—this is exactly my college friend’s argument about why I should talk with less justification; “just say things!” he often cajoles—“but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation. As Coates explains, hedges like these ‘are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.’”

This is how I’ve always felt. It’s personally easier for me to open up in a “gentle” conversation—and I want others to experience that same softness and warmth from me. It seems more authentic to openly admit that I don’t have all the answers (or even some of them) while discussing sensitive ideas, and to leave plenty of space for other people’s lived experiences to differ from my own.

That’s valuable. Especially on the internet (I share most of my writing online) where we lack tone, inflection, and other nonverbal cues that convey our intentions.

So why did I blindly take advice to scan my communication for hedges I could rip out—just and it seems fair to say and well, I mean—instead of questioning the underlying system that advice was built on? Why should “professional” communication match the way men often talk instead of how women do? Why should even “casual” writing?

I’m finally able to name one of my fundamental issues with Brett’s suggestion to change the way I speak. Why, in a conversation between the two of us—both equal participants, both with our own natural communication styles—should I be the one to adjust my approach? I’m not saying it should automatically be him, either. In my perfect world we’d attain a middle ground, or consider for whom the lift would be least, or find some other way of working together toward a shared goal. But the implication that I—and yes, as the woman is part of this—should be the one to make myself different irks me. Beyond irks, actually.

As I rambled to Sean this morning, I alluded to the dog training space in which I’ve spent so much of the last decade. (I should add this skill to my resume. Top aptitude: Connecting everything back to dogs.) I’ve long believed it’s rather silly—downright stupid, actually, if I speak bluntly like Brett suggests—to compare what two people do in their daily dog training routines if they don’t have the same end goals. If I want Scout to share our van lifestyle with us, rarely needing to interact with other people or pets, but you want your dog to be a social butterfly in a crowded city environment, you should probably not copy exactly what I do. If you’re an accomplished dog sports competitor but I don’t really care about a flashy heel command, I should probably not copy exactly what you do. I fully internalized this in my first or second year as a “dedicated dog person”, and the mantra of “we all have different goals” transformed my approach to dog ownership (and, just as importantly, the way various social media posts made me feel).

The same principle goes for conversation. We can’t throw around productive opinions about the “best” or “worst” way to communicate unless we’re aligned on what the goal of the interaction actually is. Montell illustrates this point with a story about one of my own favorite journalists. On page 93, she writes about the hate mail Ann Friedman has received for perceived overuse of hedges on her podcast. “In 2015 Friedman defended her language in a piece for The Cut that gets to the heart of what linguists know about hedges but that some of Friedman’s critics seem to have missed: ‘Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.’”

Of course, effective communication is not a simple “this or that”. We should be aware of our audience whenever we talk, write, sing, whatever. Linguistic differences do not always fall along gender lines (and gender lines are, themselves, blurred spectrums more than binary distinctions). But cooperative styles of communication often seen in women-to-women conversations serve important purposes—and instead of always avoiding them (and feeling vaguely shameful when I just can’t) it makes total sense for me to continue employing them when it feels right.

Right it often feels.