Language is a funny thing. When you hear the word, you may first think of the words you say, the grammar class you hated in school, the foreign language that you never quite mastered. Or Captain America's reminder to the Avengers to watch theirs.
One thing that fascinated me when learning about language is the use of pauses and interruptions. There seem to be at least two levels of culture in effect here. (Okay, there are probably at least a dozen more levels that I'm not mentioning, but I'm going to talk about two.) Let's talk about the culture of your nationality. For simplicity, we'll define that as the place where most people speak your language natively. And we're not even getting into accents or dialects.
The other culture that I'm going to mention is your family culture. The culture of those you grew up with.
It's likely that each of these cultures has a (usually unspoken) rule about how to interrupt someone. What kind of space to give their words. Some cultures seem to nearly speak over each other taking no mind for what anyone else is saying. At least that's how it seems to me.
Other cultures give space to a speaker and their words, waiting until they are finished before proceeding to respond.
Sometimes family culture can clash with national culture. Sometimes the two cultures reinforce each other.
Where do you think you fall on the scale? Do you tend towards overlapping dialogue, or do you pull back to give space? What are the advantages of your style? Do you see any advantages to the opposing style?
Just a thought.
-Good luck.-
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