According to Peter Kowalski's latest taxonomy developed for our client at Georgia Tech, there are 26 different categories of conversation. Whether it's a conversation in your living room, on Twitter, on Facebook or on Blog, pretty much everything falls into one or more of the following categories.
- Acknowledging receipt of information
- Advertising something
- Answering a question
- Asking a question
- Augmenting a previous post
- Calling for action
- Disclosing personal information
- Distributing media
- Expressing agreement
- Expressing criticism
- Expressing support
- Expressing surprise
- Giving a heads-up
- Giving a shout-out
- Making a joke
- Making a suggestion
- Making an observation
- Offering a greeting
- Offering an opinion
- Putting out a wanted ad
- Rallying support
- Recruiting people
- Responding to criticism
- Showing dismay
- Soliciting comments
- Soliciting help
Laughing Mind I like the way you think. We actually find segmenting them into "Supportive" "Neutral" and "Critical" is helpful as well
Posted by: [email protected] | May 27, 2010 at 11:38 AM
Interesting list. I found myself trying to see how many I could cluster under a simpler pattern using the 4 levels of dialogue that Bill Isaacs covers under his work at http://www.dialogos.com/about/heritage.html also covered at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue
Anyway, those 4 levels of dialogue:
Stage one is "Shared Monologues", where group members get used to talking to each other.
Stage two is "Skillful Discussion", where people are learning the skills of dialogue.
Stage three is "Reflective Dialogue", which is approximately Bohm's idea of dialogue.
Stage four is "Generative Dialogue", a special "creative" dialogue Isaacs seeks for his groups.
Posted by: Laughingmind | May 27, 2010 at 09:50 AM
And, I thought I was always being unique and creative. Nothing is ever new, is it?
Posted by: Myrna | August 25, 2009 at 01:28 AM