I’m currently enjoying Deborah Tannen’s book on Conversational Style. Here is her summary of that might be called New Yorker style. Sometime’s it’s called fast talking, People unpracticed in this style often find in exausting or obnoxious. She calls it “HIgh-Involvement Style.”
1. Topic
- (a) prefer personal topics,
- (b) shift topics abruptly,
- (c) introduce topics without hesitance,
- (d) persistence (if a new topic is not picked up by others, reintroduce it. Data show persistence up to a maximum of seven tries).
2. Genre
- (a) tell more stories,
- (b) tell stories in rounds, in which (i) internal evaluation (Labov, 1972) is preferred over external (i.e., demonstrate the point of the story rather than lexicaling it), (ii) omit abstract (Labov, 1972) (i.e. plunge right in without introduction; cohesion is established by juxtaposition and theme);
- (c) preferred point of a story is the emotional experience of the teller.
3. Pace
- (a) faster rate of speech
- (b) pauses avoided (silence has a negative value; it is taken as evidence of lack of rapport-Tannen, 1984);
- (c) faster rate of turn taking,
- (d) cooperative overlap (the notion of back-channel responses [Duncan 1974] is extended to include lengthy questions and echoes, resulting from a process of participatory listenership).
4. Expressive paralinguistics
- (a) expressive phonology,
- (b) pitch and amplitude shifts,
- (c) marked voice quality,
- (d) strategic pauses
If you’re not used to this style and you use a more Midwest turn-taking approach, you might never get in a word edgewise. (very frustrating)
Presumably, and one reason why we New Yorkers are thought to be so obnoxious.
On the other hand you’d hardly believe how frustratingly tedious online discourse is because it tend to force turn taking.
That said I know people in the open source community who are great online and intolerably dominating in person :).