Words have power, and the phrases we choose reveal more about us than we might realize. Some expressions can signal a lack of critical thinking or intellectual curiosity, even when we don’t mean it ...

The difference between sounding smart and actually being taken seriously often comes down to a handful of carefully chosen phrases ...

Conversation isn’t taught in school the way writing and public speaking are, so we have to pick it up on our own—which is one reason there’s such wide variation in how satisfying our conversations are ...