Shared Talking Styles

Talking Styles 1

Shared Talking Styles
Letithia Terry
COM200: Interpersonal Communication
Katie Decker
June 20, 2011

Talking Styles   2

Shared Talking Styles

I read the article, “Shared Talking Styles Herald New and Lasting Romance” by Bruce Bower.

He talked about how the length of relationships can be based on your styles of communication. Bower

also discusses how the use of function words such as; pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions

and negations”(Bower) can have an affect on conversation partners. He goes own to explain how

language style matching “signifies not how much two people like each other but how much each is

paying attention to what the other says”(Bower). After reading the article, I went to the Language Style

Matching website and took the test. In this essay I will talk about my score and my thoughts about the

Language Style Matching test.

When I first read the directions to the Language Style Matching test, I was wondering what

kind of results I would be given based on single conversation. I use a conversation between my best-

friend and I, through via text message and the score we received was 0.72. My best-friend and I have

been close since we were in the second grade,   I believed the way that we used our words effected our

score. I do not believe the website score was accurate because of the closeness that we share, and   the

understanding that we have with each other.   There are times we can finish each others sentences

because we know each other thoughts on certain subjects. I thought that we would get a higher score

than what we received.

I do not know how they come up with the scoring on this test, the information that they used to

compute the scores. I do not believe that language style matching is a thorough way to predict the

quality of interpersonal relationships or any kind of relationship. I think test like these are for certain

kinds of...