Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the ...

But I don't want to go all doom and gloom immediately, and in months since Harvey Randall took a look at the state of the game last year, a lot of stuff has happened. It's a tale of two halves ...

I might find that encouraging and add more detail,” says Nguyen. “But if you do something like, ‘Uh-huh,’ I’m going to assume you aren’t interested in more detail.” A key part of ...