During the Covid lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, our sojourns outside of the house were minimized for the better part of two years. We didn’t call friends and family often and were ordered not to socialize in public. We may have resorted to short emails, private messaging on Facebook and other social media sites, and texting, but the verbal conversation dwindled considerably. Why? Perhaps it was partly a case that there wasn’t much to talk about other than the news and who wanted to talk about Covid this and Covid that? What happened to a trivial conversation? The sad part is that this lack of verbal communication was starting to affect how we, as writers, wrote dialogue passages. Why? Quite simply, when you think about it, if we can no longer keep up a conversation, even with someone we live with, how can we, as writers, possibly write believable dialogue? Hopefully, lockdowns and health alerts like Covid are a thing of the past. But we need to get the verbal conversations going again. We can’t survive on the blandness of acronymic communications where everything is shortened to the bare essentials of vocabulary. BTW and LOL (and many others) only go so far in communication and it doesn’t work too well in the verbal form.

If we don’t verbally speak to others, either in person, on the phone, or in a Google Meet (or other virtual online meeting venue), then we’ll never be able to write believable dialogue; at least, not without the short forms we’ve come to use so often in the written forms of communication. I remember spending hours on the phone talking to friends, even after seeing them all day at school or work. Now, you go into a coffee shop and everyone’s glued to their devices, often texting to the person sitting right next to them. Have they forgotten how to speak? Or is it the heaviness of acronyms weighing them down?

The best and most productive way to improve our writing skills, especially when writing dialogue, is to spend time talking to others – really talking, not texting, not messaging, but talking. And listening to what others have to say. The best way to start a conversation is to ask a question. I remember my grandmother frequently saying that to get someone talking to you, ask them how they’re feeling. Everyone loves to talk about themselves and to discuss their health issues. Once you get the other person talking, keep asking questions and show interest in what they have to say. Insert some statements about the weather or current politics (that’s always a hot topic to discuss). It's important to keep the conversation going without dominating it. A good listener will always manage to maintain an engaging conversation.

So, have we lost the gift of the gab? Perhaps to a certain extent, but it’s still retrievable. We can pick up the conversations where we left off the last time we engaged in discussing anything and everything. And, it’ll help our writing skills. Acronyms, unfortunately, have their place in contemporary living, but we don’t have to allow them to dominate our communication skills. Acronyms are not the best vocabulary (if one can call it that) to insert in a lengthy dialogue passage. No one wants to read a list of acronyms, especially if many of these acronyms are so vague that few people will figure out what they mean. In writing dialogue, use acronyms sparingly. I avoid them altogether.