Coyne’s Rule of Conversation

March 12, 2025 • 12:00 pm

Along with the other rules I’ve proposed (e.g., “button your shirt from the bottom up and you’ll never mis-button”), I have one that I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before. However, the pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on the incidence of logorrhea, and so I will propose this one again, with a couple of qualifiers. First, the rule, which is mine. It’s coming.  Here it is:

In general, in a conversation between two individuals, you should limit yourself to no more than three sentences in a row before the other person gets to speak.

There are of course exceptions.  If someone is telling you a story, giving you instructions, or has a problem or is distraught, then, yes, they can speak longer and you should be more patient.  Or if you’ve being interviewed, you can go longer, for they can cut the transcript; and anyway, the purpose of an interview is to give the interviewee more airtime than the interviewer.

I’m sure there are other exceptions as well. What I am referring to is polite social discourse, which should involve an exchange between individuals—a fair exchange. I’m sure you’ve chafed when someone runs on and on and on, which seems self-absorbed; so you understand the value of “fair conversational exchange. I have found that three sentences is about the optimum length to ensure a decent conversation, but of course remember that this rule reflects my judgement and limited patience.

25 thoughts on “Coyne’s Rule of Conversation”

  1. Thanks. Very good guidance. A reminder to try to form full thoughts in mind before starting to speak. Who was it that was described as speaking in fully formed paragraphs? That would be the gold standard. I am terrible at it but will take this reminder to try to do better.

    1. Might you be referring to Dr. Coyne’s admiration of Steven Pinker’s ability to express himself? I seem to recall PCC(e) remarking upon that more than once.

      And I agree with the three sentence recommendation.

      1. Yes. Thanks! I think that Prof Pinker is one and there was one other I faintly recall….

    1. The best definition of a sentence I’ve ever come across is in Pinker’s “The Language Instinct.” Paraphrasing somewhat, he wrote that a sentence has a predicate that makes a statement about its subject you can argue the truth or falseness of.

      So, “He left.” is a sentence.
      But “When he left.” is not.

      1. Kens: When did Pinker lose his wallet?
        DaveL: When he left.

        Was my reply a sentence or not?

        1. No, your reply is actually a fragment. The understood but unexpressed subject, verb, and direct object of the verb is, “Pinker lost his wallet . . .”

          Of course, the sentence could be arranged to begin with the adverb phrase, “When he left, . . .”

          I hope that makes sense.

          It is confusing, in large part because we so often express ourselves orally in sentence fragments.

          I had a heck of a time trying to explain what a complete sentence was to my 8th grade students until I came across Pinker’s explanation. One of the most fun and rewarding discussions I can remember happened when a student asked, “but what about a sentence like ‘Jim likes pizza’? That’s an opinion, isn’t it? How can it be true or false?” I replied, think like a detective. Could you gather evidence you could use to support believing that Jim’s liking pizza is true or false? And the room was filled with suggestions on how we might gather that evidence.

          Oops, sorry for lapsing into a happy teaching memory. I’ve broken the three sentence rule.

          1. A sentence fragment – of course! How could I have forgotten after 41 years of teaching English?

            I suppose I forgot because after a few years of trying to teach formal notions of a sentence, using various traditional (but defective and uninformative) definitions I found it more productive to focus on clarity of meaning and appropriateness of style in context.

            In my last ten years of teaching English, all to 12-18-year-old pupils, none of whom spoke English as a first language, it was never necessary to define a sentence; it was necessary to show how thoughts of various types were rendered in English.

            How would your class have gone with Chomsky’s classic, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”?

  3. What I try to remember in polite conversation is to only speak a couple sentences on a topic and then pass it to the other person by asking about they think. A lot of people aren’t really listening to me anyway, they’re thinking about what they want to say next.

    1. I would say most people are not listening to you (or me!) and to not take it personally. I have to remind myself to really listen to the other person, to not interrupt, and recognize that they might say something that I can learn from.

      Once you are conscious of this in yourself, you see it constantly in others. You can see the look in their eyes as you are talking…they aren’t listening, they’re just thinking of what to say next and waiting for a pause to jump in.

  4. A very good reminder. I’m guilty of rambling in conversation. I allow the same from others, but your rule is a good guide. For some reason, when I read it here, it sticks. I still can’t “unremember” all the teeth brushing tips. I already knew about washing “Dry Clean Onlys”, what’s next?

  5. I can easily/readily go off topic during a conversation. Like Dirk Gently who believes in the interconnectedness of all things, I can expand too easily into the arcane via word association football. But I do like to close the loop in my part of the conversation by re-presenting to the previous speaker a precis his own contribution, sort of like how in some societies, you hand the joint back to the person who rolled it.

  6. There’s an interesting article ( https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/huh-the-valuable-role-of-interjections/ ) about the role of interjections in conversation.

    Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: “We are building common ground, and we are taking turns.”

    So, yes, three sentences may be a good rule of thumb but you need to also pay attention to the ‘um’s, ‘uh’s, ‘huh?’s and so on.

  7. “You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”

    The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, book two)
    J.R.R. Tolkien
    1954
    Allen & Unwin

  8. “button your shirt from the bottom up and you’ll never mis-button”

    Sometimes tailors will include replacement buttons sewn onto the shirt underneath the bottom button. I’ve accidentally (mis-)used these before as the bottom button so this rule doesn’t hold.

  9. One of my favourite activities is discussing/debating with my best friend. We are often guilty of extemporising way beyond what is useful, so the 3 sentence rule is an interesting suggestion.

    Typically, our responses are a response to the others point followed by a counter/supportive point. Achieving that in 3 sentences is a challenge, but a fun one.

    In any conversation where someone just hogs the floor for the longest time, it suggests to me that they might simply be employing the Gish Gallop (a concept that I learned of here).

    BTW Unrelated, but if our host comes up with any new terms/phrases we can describe them as a new Coynage. It was in my head. I needed to release it. You’re very welcome.

  10. This is part of why I avoid “polite social discourse” if I can, and if forced, I tend just to watch and listen. If we have to worry about the pacing of turns for sentences, nothing very interesting is going on.

  12. As you say, there are of course exceptions, but even after the exceptions I try to be mindful of everyone in the conversation. I lunch every week with a bunch of friends, and we can all be animated and tell stories, but I make a point of asking them a question to get them to talk if I feel I have talked too long, We also make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the conversation and give us an update on their week. I’ve known some of them for over 30 years so we’ve got used to each other’s foibles by now.

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