Spoken Discourse

Last week in class, one aspect of spoken discourse we discussed was phone closings. As it is considered rude to hang up the phone abruptly, telephone users often use pre-closing devices to lead the converastion to terminal exchanges.

Upon reflection, I realise that I often use warrants and summing up the reason for the call to signal that I was ready to hang up. However, it is a different case when my friends sometimes call for the purpose of random chitchat. Such calls often last more than an hour and when the use of warrants fail to steer the conversation to an end, I find that it usually takes an overt announcement on my part before I feel it's alright for me to hang up. They range from "It's getting late. I'm feeling sleepy." to "My mum is nagging at me to stop hogging the phone." Often after I've made my excuses, the conversation would come to an end.

However, there were a couple of times when I was involved in phone conversations in which the other party did not seem to get my hints that I was ready to close our phone conversation. It is frustrating when this happens. But I have since devised a method to end such "never-ending" phone conversations.

First, I will use another phone to call the number I'm currently using to chat.

Me: Sorry, I got another call coming in. Please hold.

(clicks to the other line and count for 10 seconds before switching back to first caller)

Me: Hey. Someone's calling for my mother/sister/etc. on the other line. I'll talk to you another time alright? Sorry. Bye.

It's kind of sneaky but it works. And at the very least I didn't put the person on hold indefinitely, which actually happened to me once. -_- (My friend swore she forgot I was on the other line.)