As the novelist E. M. Forster put it in A Passage to India, “a pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry.” When conversations go awry, we look for causes, and usually find them by blaming others or ourselves. The most generous-minded among us blame the relationship. This book shows how much of this blame is misplaced. Bad feelings are often the result of misunderstandings that arise from differences in conversational style.
