Let them finish

A culture of speed treats the good conversationalist as the one who understands fast and answers fast. So interrupting is easily disguised as quick-wittedness: the point is already clear, why wait for the end?

Sometimes it really is clear. But the person still has the right to finish it himself.

Hearing someone out has several advantages: they may clarify the main thing, the original wording may change, the emotional weight of the subject becomes apparent, the chance of answering the wrong question falls, and the person feels they took part in a conversation rather than supplying material for your line.

“Yes, I know” is particularly dangerous. It can mean:

I have heard this information.

What the other person often hears is:

Your thought does not deserve to be finished.

Even a familiar story may contain a new detail, or simply matter to the speaker right now.

This does not mean every monologue must be endured until it dies of natural causes. You can stop a repetition or bring the conversation back to the subject:

I have got the main point. Am I right that the deadline is what matters here?

May I check something before we move on?

We have ten minutes left, let’s get to the decision.

Interrupting is sometimes necessary: when time is limited, when there is an obvious factual error, when the question is being dodged or a boundary is being crossed. The difference is that it serves the conversation and not only your impatience.

If the other person knows the subject better, listening pays especially well. But authority does not require silent worship. Specialists are wrong too, and a question can expose a difference in premises.

The respectful form is simple:

I may be missing something. How does that fit with…?

Checking your doubt later is sensible. Staying silent for ever just because the other person has more experience is less sensible.

The cost of interrupting is most obvious where the detail matters. A service adviser at a garage who says “right, knocking in the suspension” on the customer’s second sentence sometimes never hears that the knocking appears only from cold and only turning left. Diagnosis then takes an extra hour, paid for by both sides. The customer usually goes quiet at that point: if the mechanic said “right”, he must know better. The knocking from cold comes to light a week later, and by then it costs extra.

People rarely put the main thing first. They tend to move from what they noticed earliest to what actually matters, and “I’ve got it” stops them around the halfway mark.