The Art of Civilized Conversation: A Guide to Expressing Yourself With Style and Grace

You know the person who is shy, talks too much, and always puts her foot in her mouth and winds up offending you? Yeah. That's me. I got this book in the hopes that it would help me to be able to socially chat in group settings.

I enjoyed this book. It has given me some advice and some pointers in how to have conversations with people. Some of the tips are pretty obvious, but still stated in such a way to give me pause. The author has some insightful things to say as well. She gives brief lists of do's and dont's for almost all of the topics in the book. For example how to (and how not to) accept a compliment. One major problem I had is that the author seems to regard conversation as a game. I don't. So in some instances her outlook did not help me.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is a bore, who is shy, or who always seems to be putting thier foot in thier mouth. Honestly I would recommend it to anyone wanting to improve thier conversational skills.