In this video I teach you how to improve your communication skill and be more articulate by memorizing stock phrases for the common situations you face.

http://www.howcommunicationworks.com

It is often hard to know the right thing to say, especially in the moment when it counts the most.

We can memorize rules about social interaction, but rules don't tell us what to say.

Communication skill is not about learning abstract rules or strategiesit's about having the actual words come to mind so we can say them instead of standing there grasping for words.

And the only way I know how to do that is to fill my mind with good words by reading poems, speeches, books, plays, lyrics, and articles by all the great communicators who have come before me or are alive now.

When someone says something well, I take note of it, either mentally or by making an actual note in my phone or notebook.

Then I try to make that exact phrase my own. Over a lifetime, you develop a catalog of phrases that you can reuse with only slight variation.

Every type of situation has its own idiom, its own particular set of stock phrases.

Learning to me a good communicator is often just a process of learning the idiom for whatever situation concerns you most.

This is not shallow or superficial, the act of memorizing phrases and reusing them.

It's how all communication works.

It's why gmail can have a phrase completion algorithm that works extremely well most of the time. Because most of our language use is drawn from a phrasal lexicon.

Because almost none of what we say, especially in ordinary, facetoface interaction, is all that original.