Talking Styles 1
Shared Talking Styles
Letithia Terry
COM200: Interpersonal Communication
Katie Decker
June 20, 2011
Talking Styles 2
Shared Talking Styles
I read the article, “Shared Talking Styles Herald New and Lasting Romance” by Bruce Bower.
He talked about how the length of relationships can be based on your styles of communication. Bower
also discusses how the use of function words such as; pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions
and negations”(Bower) can have an affect on conversation partners. He goes own to explain how
language style matching “signifies not how much two people like each other but how much each is
paying attention to what the other says”(Bower). After reading the article, I went to the Language Style
Matching website and took the test. In this essay I will talk about my score and my thoughts about the
Language Style Matching test.
When I first read the directions to the Language Style Matching test, I was wondering what
kind of results I would be given based on single conversation. I use a conversation between my best-
friend and I, through via text message and the score we received was 0.72. My best-friend and I have
been close since we were in the second grade, I believed the way that we used our words effected our
score. I do not believe the website score was accurate because of the closeness that we share, and the
understanding that we have with each other. There are times we can finish each others sentences
because we know each other thoughts on certain subjects. I thought that we would get a higher score
than what we received.
I do not know how they come up with the scoring on this test, the information that they used to
compute the scores. I do not believe that language style matching is a thorough way to predict the
quality of interpersonal relationships or any kind of relationship. I think test like these are for certain
kinds of...